“She would do a full face and hair, put on gloves, a suit, and high heels to walk down to the mail box. “Jessica and I decided that everything, for Joan, was a performance,” said Murphy. What I did know is that she had a mini-refrigerator made for her bathroom, which, at the time, was unheard of, in which she kept her witch hazel and her vodka and her ice cubes. “We didn’t have a lot of pictures to go on for her bedroom and bathroom area. “The bathroom was a tribute to the old movie-star bathrooms of yore,” said Murphy.
She couldn’t control who had abused her, but goddamn it, she could control her glove drawer.”
I think what she took from that was that cleaning created a sense of order and calm. She put her way through that school by scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets. “She was sent off to a boarding home, I think, when she was 11. “Joan Crawford was an abused child-sexually and physically,” explained Murphy. On the surface, that just seems like a weird character trait, but actually, I was very moved by it. She was a matchy-matchy person, and fanatical about control and order. “If you listen to her book My Way of Life, she dedicates chapters to organizing her clothes by season-and color coding clothes, gloves, hats, underwear, and shoes. “Joan Crawford's bathrooms and her organizational skills were insanely great,” said Murphy. (Indeed, in Crawford’s memoir, she explained that Haines even nicknamed the signature blue covering her living-room walls “Crawford blue.”) “I think the combination denotes cleanliness and order.” (In contrast, Bette Davis’s cozy East Coast-style home-full of comfy couches, hearths, and dark woods-is swathed in warm browns.) “Joan Crawford was also very obsessed with the color blue in her homes-blue mixed with cream,” said Murphy. (One example of their interior-design license: the artificial cherry tree in Crawford’s living room, which Crawford used as a design flourish in the grand Manhattan apartment she and her husband, Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele, shared in the 1950s.) Rather than re-create the Brentwood mansion associated with Crawford’s Mommie Dearest days, Murphy and Becker pored over archival photographs of Crawford’s homes over the years-hand-picking the details they liked best.
JOAN HOPPER MOVIE
He was a true modernist, and brought a lot of that modern verve and vivid color to California decorating in that movie star period.” “When we could, we tried to be slavishly loyal to what Billy Haines and she had concocted,” said Murphy. “Then Judy and I had a collaboration, so it felt very full circle to me.”Īhead, the delicious details of re-creating Crawford’s estate. “Their friendship is important to me, so I really wanted to show that off-and be particular and loyal to their special friendship and that collaboration,” said Murphy. She also enlisted him and Shields to give her Los Angeles home an overhaul-and helped launch his career as Hollywood’s go-to interior designer. Crawford did not only stand by him, though. She was also a really good person and a really good friend.”Ĭase in point: Crawford’s fierce loyalty to actor Williams Haines ( Little Annie Rooney, Show People), even after his movie career fizzled because he refused to hide his homosexuality-or his boyfriend Jimmie Shields-from the public, unlike other gay movie stars of the era.
But Joan Crawford was more than what her daughter wrote. “I’m not going to try and dispute Christina Crawford or her book, because that’s her personal recollection. “Joan Crawford has gotten a really bad rap through the years, because of that Mommie Dearest film, which froze her as this wire hangers, monstrous archetype,” Murphy explained by phone on Wednesday. But with Feud, which airs its third episode on FX this Sunday, Murphy hopes to do more than reframe this famous Hollywood rivalry-he wants to soften Crawford’s image while he’s at it.
JOAN HOPPER SERIES
Before tuning into Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series Feud, many audience members likely had preconceptions about the over-the-top Old Hollywood stars at its center: Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis ( Susan Sarandon)-particularly Crawford, who was villainized in her daughter’s notorious tell-all, Mommie Dearest.
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