Much has been written about Oscar-winning screen queen Joan Crawford--most notoriously by her daughter Christina in her knives-out 1978 tell-all, Mommie Dearest, whose movie treatment imprinted the high-camp Crawford persona on the public's imagination. With Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face, Scott Eyman presents an admiring corrective that also honors his subject's objectively outsize personality.
Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur, probably in San Antonio, Tex., probably in 1905 (the records are sketchy). When she and her working-class family were living in Lawton, Okla., she became besotted with the movies. Crawford chose dancing as her path to show business and eventually earned a chorus-girl job in New York, where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screen-tested her; on January 1, 1925, she was Hollywood-bound.
Eyman (Cary Grant; Charlie Chaplin vs. America) is surely the preeminent living biographer of Old Hollywood, and Joan Crawford is yet another showcase for his fathomless film knowledge and wit. (On one shaky early Crawford vehicle: "Romantic comedies about archaeology are few and far between, and I Live My Life shows why.") Crawford's self-curated image of indomitability was so fortress-like that she may not be truly knowable, but Eyman gets damned close. His book incorporates his interviews with Crawford's surviving colleagues, her deceased peers' offspring, and her grandson, who shared his fondly remembered grandmother's papers with Eyman. As for Crawford's diva reputation, Eyman notches many episodes but dispatches the Mommie Dearest persona with a perfect swipe at the movie: "The film's sole positive attribute was that it seriously damaged the careers of everyone connected with it."--Nell Beram, author and freelance writer