Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday February 1, 2011
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POSSESSED: The Life of Joan Crawford
Donald Spoto
William Morrow
ISBN 978-0061856006
336 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Charles Matthews
First you're another
Sloe-eyed vamp,
Then someone's mother,
Then you're camp.
The career arc of the Hollywood actress was neatly traced by Stephen Sondheim in the song "I'm Still Here" from the musical"Follies." Joan Crawford perfectly fits that paradigm: The flapper of "Our Dancing Daughters" became the suffering mother of "Mildred Pierce" and, finally, the faded star of the over-the-top "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Donald Spoto fleshes out the pattern a little more in his new biography. "For half a century, she assessed what the public wanted in each era: the jazz baby during the 1920s; the independent thinker of the 1930s; the troubled postwar woman of the1940s; the romantically starved woman of the 1950s; the horror queen of the 1960s and 1970s."
It was her own sheer ambition and determination that transformed Lucille Le Sueur, the former laundress and chorus girl, into Joan Crawford, the embodiment of Hollywood glamour. Born and raised in poverty, she was barely educated, admitting late in life that she "never went beyond the fifth grade." But when she married the sophisticated Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Spoto tells us, she set about "with her usual single-minded energy" to turn herself into a "society doyenne": "She studied French, engaged a vocal coach and learned opera arias, she learned to dress with better taste, and ... read voraciously, picking up a book whenever she had a quarter hour to herself at home: the Romantic poets, the classics, history, the nineteenth century novelists, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and more." The intensity of her efforts at self-improvement can by gauged by a claim she made: "I became a pretty good polo player in order to get over my fear of horses." Which is a little like swimming the English Channel to get over a fear of water.
Spoto's biography gives you the sense that it must have been terribly exhausting to be Crawford, always laboring to achieve and hold on to stardom. No wonder she hit the vodka bottle a little too much, and married too often and seldom well. It didn't help, either, that iconoclasts were always ready to hack away at her image.
Even when she was still Lucille Le Sueur, there were rumors she had danced nude in nightclubs and made pornographic movies: One man approached MGM with a clip from a film that he claimed was of her, offering to sell it to the studio or he would take it to the papers. Though studio head Louis B. Mayer asserted that "the girl in this picture could be anybody -- anyone at all -- except our Lucille," Spoto also notes that the blackmailer's "house mysteriously burned to the ground the following month."
But the greatest damage to Crawford's reputation was done posthumously, by her adopted daughter, Christina, and by makers of the 1981 film version of Christina's memoir, "Mommie Dearest," which presented Joan as a cold, harshly demanding, excessively controlling mother. Spoto calls the book "a vituperative act of revenge after Joan excised her two oldest children from her will after many years of discord." He is determined to repair the damage, even investigating the most famous moment in the book and movie, in which Joan attacks Christina for putting her clothes on the wrong kind of hangers: "No wire hangers, ever!"According to Spoto, launderers and dry cleaners "were under strict instructions to return all clothing on the richly covered hangers Joan provided." He thinks Christina remembered these instructions and reworked them into "a mad scene worthy of Italian opera."
Spoto is an unapologetic fan, beginning his book with Crawford's response to a letter he wrote her as an 11-year-old in 1952. He has seen, and writes about, every extant Crawford film, and "Possessed" is larded with praise for her acting. But he is willing to admit that Crawford betrayed herself into that final stage of her career: camp. She "regarded the thickly arched eyebrows and over-the-lip gloss as an infallible sign of female desirability," long after the fashion had faded. As a result,"her appearance is something to get beyond, before the quality of the acting can be assessed. Alas, performers of drag quickly got to work and offered depressingly accurate parodies."
A prolific biographer of almost everyone from Jesus to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Spoto has interviewed and written about so many of Crawford's contemporaries that he seems to feel compelled to tell us everything even remotely related to his subject, and the book sometimes feels padded. His prose plods at best but sometimes stumbles, as when he writes about Crawford traveling with "a trunk full of furs and her millionaire husband."
But we need a reassessment of Crawford, a star now eclipsed by such contemporaries as Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, even though she was probably as good an actress as any of them. Her lively, natural performance is the best thing in "Grand Hotel," that display case full of ham, and she stole "The Women" out from under the neatly powdered noses of Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard and Joan Fontaine. Spoto has given us a useful start at rescuing Crawford not only from Christina, but also from herself.
Charles Matthews is a writer and editor in Northern California.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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ESCAPE FROM THE LAND OF SNOWS: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero
ESCAPE FROM THE LAND OF SNOWS: The Young Dalai Lama's Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual HeroStephen Talty
Crown
ISBN 978-0307460950
302 pages
$26
MY SPIRITUAL JOURNEY: Personal Reflections, Teachings, and Talks the Dalai Lama with Sofia Stril-Rever. Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell My Spiritual Journey
HarperOne
ISBN 978-0061960222
284 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Jeffrey Paine
Was there ever a more unlikely life story? A child is born somewhere too remote to appear on any known map, and his childhood, though taking place in the mid-20th century, is redolent of the Middle Ages. Yet that boy grows up to become probably the most admired citizen of the world today. The strangest fact about the Dalai Lama's strange life, though, is that it remains largely untold. Most books promoted as biographies of him hardly qualify as such and are indeed no more revealing than Testu Saiwai's manga, or cartoon, biography is here.
Of recent attempts to provide insight into the Dalai Lama, the most ambitious is popular writer Stephan Talty's "Escape from the Land of Snows." Talty has actually written three books in one: a biography of the young Dalai Lama up to his 24th year (1959), a history of recent Tibet and a hair-raising tale of daring and escape. The last of these makes Talty's story come alive -- and made the Dalai Lama the man he is today.
A decade after China's brutal conquest of Tibet, in 1959 a rumor leaked out that the Chinese communists were planning to assassinate the Dalai Lama. At a moment's notice, with scarcely any provisions, he undertook a near-suicidal flight across the trackless Himalayas. During that flight he began to shed the Tibetan ritual and ceremony that had always cocooned him. Confronting constant hardship, danger and imminent death, he transformed himself from an institution into an individual and thus began the process in which he became a Dalai Lama not just for Tibetans but for religious seekers everywhere.
This adventure Talty tells remarkably well. Earlier, however, he seems almost timid with his materials: cautious when describing the Dalai Lama's uncanny childhood, lest he appear too gullible; hedging when recounting Chinese atrocities in Tibet, lest he appear too partisan. (Here Tetsu Saiwai's manga biography is clearer, exploring what was extraordinary and indicting what was brutal. Comic strips can be freer.) Worse, the Dalai Lama is off-stage for nearly half the book while Talty explains Tibetan politics and history, and his inner character remains as elusive as ever.
The Dalai Lama himself prefers not to discuss his inner life but rather social issues or Buddhist thought. As for the latter, others -- notably Anam Thubten, Traleg Kyabgon and Tsoknyi Rinpoche -- have written books that explain Tibetan Buddhism better to Westerners. If Tibetan Buddhism is popular among non-Tibetans today, it is not for what the Dalai Lama says but for how he has acted and lived out its principles in public. Two new books with the Dalai Lama himself named as their author would seem to offer us both a look from the inside and a sense of why he is such an attractive figure.
Except that the Dalai Lama did not write, or apparently read, any of "The Essence of Happiness," nor of the bestselling "The Art of Happiness" from which it is excerpted. Howard Cutler has interviewed the Dalai Lama and from those interviews has assembled a self-help book, reduced here to nugget-size bites, which omits whatever is unique to or difficult about Tibetan Buddhism.
A whole page, for example, is occupied by three words: "Change takes time." One hardly needs the Dalai Lama to produce that pearl of wisdom; your addled great-uncle Clarence will do.
If "The Essence of Happiness" has a misleading byline, "My Spiritual Journey" has a misleading title, for it is no autobiography.
These selected talks and teachings are assembled, though, to reveal "the temporal continuity of the Dalai Lama's thinking." And gradually the book does paint a kind of Portrait of the Lama as a Young (and Aging) Man, as it traces his largely unchanged consciousness from youth to the present day.
For readers interested in knowing what has remained constant in the Dalai Lama throughout his life, "My Spiritual Journey" identifies three characteristics. First, look for compassionate motivation: Far from hating the Chinese, for example, he prays for their welfare and thinks of them as his brothers and sisters. Secondly, look for the lack of a sense of self-importance: He considers his exceptional life as being merely ordinary, and he describes himself in a down-to-earth, often comical light. Finally, and perhaps most important, is his mental flexibility. The Dalai Lama appears able to accommodate every possible situation: He can imagine how Tibetans could become an acceptable part of China, for instance, and he can accept that there may not be another Dalai Lama after him or, if there is, it could be a woman. "If I reincarnate as a woman," he jokes, "naturally I will be a very beautiful woman physically."
Among the things the Dalai Lama can accept is that there is no absolute need for his own religious calling. "As a Buddhist, I don't see any difference between religious practice and daily life," he writes. "One can do without religion, but not without spirituality." "Spirituality" may be the most nebulous word in the English language, but "My Spiritual Journey" provides a definition that both devotee and atheist might approve: "the full blossoming of human values that is essential for the good of all." And what would a fully blossomed human being look like? The four books reviewed here -- in comic-book form or by collection of sayings, through adventure tale or indirect confession -- provide one possible illustration, a workable prototype.
Jeffery Paine is the author of, among other books, "Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism Comes to the West" and the editor of "Adventures with the Buddha."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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