Joan Crawford built one of Hollywood’s most enduring careers on ambition, control, and an unrelenting refusal to accept second place. But the path to stardom began in poverty, not glamour. Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, she was abandoned by her father when she was only ten months old. Her mother later remarried an opera house manager, Henry J.
Kasson, whose work briefly exposed young Lucille to the artistic world, including the legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova. That excitement masked a darker reality. For years, Lucille believed Kasson was her biological father, but when she was around eleven, he began mistreating her. Home became a place she needed to escape.
She left school and a relationship with a trumpet player in 1922, gambling on a career as a dancer, performing in chorus lines across the country. The gamble worked, and she soon landed small roles in Hollywood films, though the studios thought her name sounded too much like “sewer. ” A nationwide newspaper contest was staged to pick a new name. The winning choice, Joan Arden, was already in use by another actress, so the studio settled on Joan Crawford.
Crawford’s early career was humbling. In the 1925 film “Lady of the Night,” she was used as a body double for MGM’s biggest female star, Norma Shearer. Crawford reportedly hated being second, and the rivalry with Shearer, who was married to studio executive Irving Thalberg, became one of her defining early frustrations. She developed a reputation for fierce ambition, promoting herself through dance contests and newspaper appearances, determined to control her own destiny.
In 1928, “Our Dancing Daughters” made her a major star overnight. Fame, however, brought personal complications. In 1929, she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr. , the 19-year-old son of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
and Mary Pickford. The new in-laws reportedly wanted little to do with her, and her relationship with Mary Pickford remained tense, leaving Crawford feeling like an outsider in her own marriage. While her career climbed, the marriage collapsed, ending in divorce in 1933. During that period, Crawford had an openly brazen affair with Clark Gable, despite both being married.
Her second marriage, to actor Franchot Tone in 1935, was also troubled. Tone was a serious theater actor who did not share her hunger for movie stardom, and the couple struggled with two miscarriages. Tone reportedly sank into depression and heavy drinking, and their arguments turned violent. By 1939, Crawford divorced him.
Around that time, her career hit a brutal low: in May 1938, a widely discussed article labeled her “box office poison,” arguing her salary no longer matched her drawing power. The 1940s brought both motherhood and more upheaval. After adopting a baby girl she named Christina, Crawford married actor Philip Terry in 1942. The couple adopted a boy named Christopher, but the child’s biological mother eventually reclaimed him.
They soon adopted another boy, initially named Philip Terry Jr. , but after the couple divorced in 1946, Crawford changed the boy’s name to Christopher—an act often read as an attempt to replace the child she had lost. Her professional comeback came with “Mildred Pierce. ” Director Michael Curtiz did not want her and openly disliked her trademark broad-shouldered look, reportedly interrupting a costume fitting to physically inspect her clothing for hidden shoulder pads.
Crawford fought for the role and won it. The film was a major success, and she took home the 1946 Academy Award for Best Actress—despite staying home, convinced Ingrid Bergman would win. When she learned she had won, she arranged to be photographed celebrating from her bed, turning vulnerability into publicity. In 1947, Crawford adopted two more girls, Cindy and Kathy, through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society—an organization later exposed for deeply disturbing adoption practices and the illegal removal of children from their families.
Her difficult reputation on set also grew. During the filming of the 1954 Western “Johnny Guitar,” she clashed violently with co-star Mercedes McCambridge, who had been involved with Crawford’s former partner, actor Fletcher Markle. After drinking, Crawford reportedly threw McCambridge’s clothing onto a highway, where passing cars ran it over. The most famous rivalry came in 1962 with “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” co-starring Bette Davis.
The two kept their hostility under control during filming, but the feud exploded publicly afterward. Davis mocked Crawford’s romantic history, and Crawford responded by mocking Davis’s acting style. At the 1963 Academy Awards, Davis was nominated for Best Actress, but Crawford was not. Crawford contacted the other nominees and offered to accept the award on their behalf if they could not attend.
When Anne Bancroft won and stayed home, Crawford took the stage with the Oscar while Davis watched from the audience. Later, Davis offered her own explanation for the decades-long hatred: Franchot Tone. Davis had been deeply in love with Tone, but Crawford married him, and Davis reportedly never let that go. By the 1950s, Crawford had found a new kind of power in business.
She married Alfred Steele, president of Pepsi, in 1955. When he died of a heart attack four years later, Pepsi expected Crawford to step aside. Instead, she went to gossip columnist Louella Parsons and threatened to expose what she knew about the company. Pepsi reversed its decision and gave her a seat on its board of directors.
She demanded vending machines on her movie sets and even pushed director Billy Wilder for Pepsi product placement, despite one film centering on a Coca-Cola executive. Her later years were marked by increasingly visible struggles. During rehearsals for “The Lucy Show” in 1968, her drinking was so serious that producers nearly replaced her. Her obsession with control extended to her home, where she covered much of her belongings in plastic.
After seeing photographs of herself from a party in the 1970s and being horrified by her appearance, she withdrew from public life entirely. Suggestions of bisexuality, linked to relationships or close friendships with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Marilyn Monroe, remained surrounded by rumor during her lifetime. Some biographers have also suggested she may have secretly married saxophone player James Welton in 1924, though that evidence was never fully confirmed. In 1973, Pepsi removed her from its board, and for perhaps the only time in her life, she did not fight back.
On May 6, 1977, Crawford gave away her beloved dog, Princess Lotus Blossom, because she could no longer care for it. Four days later, on May 10, 1977, she died of a heart attack at the age of 73. The story of her life intersects with another Hollywood phenomenon: Judy Garland, who was married five times. Two of Garland’s husbands, director Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron, were widely reported to have had relationships with men.
Herron maintained a long-term relationship with actor Henry Brandon that continued both before and after his brief marriage to Garland. In an era when being openly gay could ruin a career, such marriages often functioned as shields, allowing celebrities to protect their public image—a dynamic historians often call a “lavender marriage. ”
That context helps explain why Garland became so deeply connected to gay culture. Queer scholar José Muñoz described a process called “disidentification,” in which LGBTQ+ audiences take performers or stories never created for them and reshape them into something personally meaningful.
A gay man watching Garland could see his own struggles with pressure, rejection, and the battle to be accepted mirrored in her life. Queer historian David Halperin offered a different view in his book “How to Be Gay. ” He argued that many gay men could actually become deeply critical of mainstream representations shaped for straight acceptability. He also distinguished between gay culture, often dominated by conventional white gay men, and gay subculture, which traditionally made more room for women, drag queens, queer people of color, and transgender people.
For some, Garland represented something more authentic: a complicated, emotional, and subversive figure outside the boundaries of carefully packaged mainstream culture. She became a gay icon not because she was secretly part of the gay community, but because her life and vulnerability gave generations of gay men something they recognized in themselves.
