The relationship of Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Joan Crawford was one of the most riveting
and scandal-ridden romances in Hollywood during the early 1930s.
Douglas Jr was Tinseltown royalty seeing as how his father was the famed and beloved actor
Douglas Fairbanks and his stepmother was the late-great Mary Pickford.
While Jr was known as the Prince of Hollywood and followed in his parent's footsteps by
also becoming an actor, it was his wife, Crawford that would ultimately become the huge movie
star.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of Crawford that she was, without a doubt, the very best
example of a flapper.
She was the kind of girl that you would see at intellectual nightclubs, always dolled
up and possessing an unparalleled level of sophistication.
She had looks to kill, could dance like a Grecian goddess, and had these wide, striking
eyes.
Fitzgerald said that she had a 'talent for living', and we're inclined to agree with
him on at least that one point.
Crawford made her big break in the 1928 film Our Dancing Daughters.
A year later, the world was given a chance to watch as she fell in love with her crown
prince, Douglas Fairbanks Jr in the sequel to Our Dancing Daughters, Our Modern Maidens.
For film fans, the romance between Crawford and Fairbanks Jr seemed to be a match made
in heaven.
Could there have been a more perfect union?
Well, in short – yes.
Because as the years have gone by, we've learned a lot of juicy and shocking details about
the two stars relationship that shows that it wasn't the fairytale romance that people
thought it was.
Beyond that, it seems that Joan Crawford wasn't exactly the saintly figure that many thought
of her as back in those days either.
Numerous accusations, rumors, and revelations have come to light in the decades since her
passing in 1977 that warrant a bit of investigation.
While rags to riches stories were extremely popular with Depression-era audiences and
Crawford certainly exemplified this trope like none other as she helped popularize the
'Flapper' aesthetic.
Eventually, her fame began to wane, and by the end of the 1930s, she was labeled as 'box
office poison' after her films started to lose money.
After Fairbanks Jr, whom she divorced in 1923, Crawford went on to marry three more times.
Three of her four marriages ended in divorce.
In total, she would adopt five children.
One of those, however, would later be reclaimed by his birth mother.
Crawford's relationship with her children was one of the biggest reasons the public
lost faith in her.
She disinherited her two eldest children, and after her death, Crawford's daughter published
a revealing tell-all memoir titled Mommie Dearest that painted the late star in a hideous
light.
Join FactsVerse as we take a closer look at many of the rumors that have plagued Joan
Crawford before and after her death.
We'll be paying extra attention to what her first husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had to
say about his ex-wife before his death in 2000.
Fairbanks Jr.
Portrayed Crawford As Self-Centered
The marriage between Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Joan Crawford was the first for both of
the two young stars.
Fairbanks Jr was only 19, and Crawford was either 23 or 24, depending on who you ask
when they first met.
Fairbanks Jr described meeting Crawford as 'love at first sight' but his parents didn't
approve of the relationship.
Douglas's father called it an 'overexploited affair' while his mom called Crawford her
son's 'current chorus-girl fling'.
Immediately the rumor mill got to work, and accusations that Crawford was merely using
Fairbanks Jr to advance her career began circulating in the gossip rags of the day.
Still, regardless of what anyone had to say about their relationship, the duo was fairly
happy together.
Touching on their wedding day in 1929, Fairbanks Jr later said that they were extremely relieved
and happy to be married finally, and he further stated that they 'lived happily….for a while''.
As the newlywed's honeymoon phase ended, however, Crawford and Fairbanks Jr began to drift apart.
It wasn't as if they were getting into these big explosive arguments or having clandestine
affairs behind each other's back – or at least not at first.
What caused their love to erode was boredom and the banality of marriage.
They simply hadn't expected married life to be so mundane.
After all, they were both two young, up-and-coming Hollywood stars at the time.
They hardly seemed ready to settle down with a life of normalcy.
Eventually, Crawford began to look outside of her marriage for a bit of excitement and
started having an affair with actor Clark Gable.
The studio brass was concerned that their leading starlet was falling into scandal and
controversy, so they set up a second-honeymoon excursion for Fairbanks Jr and Crawford in
Europe, hoping that it might reignite their passion for each other
Unfortunately, that tactic was ineffective, and according to Douglas, Joan was absolutely
miserable the entire trip.
All that she wanted to do while on the trip was return back to Hollywood, not the couple's
Cielito Lindo home.
She missed the security of everything she knew and loved back at the MGM studios.
So, breaking with the schedule, the couple returned to the states earlier than anyone
expected.
At that point, Fairbanks Jr and Joan Crawford began living very separate lives from each
other even though they were still living together.
That only worked for a bit, but inevitably Crawford couldn't take it any longer and had
Fairbanks Jr kicked out of their house and moved all his belongings to a hotel.
At first, Fairbanks Jr felt blindsided by the ordeal, but then he learned about Crawford's
affair with Gable.
In his memoirs, Douglas wrote that he had discovered that one of Crawford and Gable's
favorite hookup spots was the portable dressing room that he had purchased for her as a gift.
If that's not a stab in the back, then we don't know what is.
While Fairbanks Jr certainly had a lot to say negatively about his ex-wife, he would
defend her after her death when her adopted daughter published her seething tell-all book,
Mommie Dearest, in 1978 – although we'll touch on that in just a bit, so be sure to
keep watching.
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Mommie Dearest
While Joan Crawford was known for many different things throughout her life and career, including
her sexuality, femininity, charitable contributions, and her phenomenal body of work, an entirely
different – and darker – picture of the star emerged after her eldest adopted daughter,
Christina Crawford, published her previously mentioned tell-all memoir in 1978.
According to Christina, Joan was a raging alcoholic and abusive mother who tended to
fly off the handle in fits of anger.
The public always knew that things between this mother-daughter pair weren't always perfect.
Their relationship apparently began to fall apart sometime around 1968, when Christina,
who was 29 at the time, took a medical leave from her role on the CBS soap opera The Secret
Storm only for her mother to replace her.
This came as a shock to Christina and drove a wedge between her and her mother's relationship.
It's rumored that Joan knew about her daughter's book before her passing in 1977, but she never
discussed it openly with her.
She did, however, make sure to omit Christina and her brother Christopher from her will
for "reason that they knew" – leaving her estate and wealth instead to her twin daughters
Cathy and Cindy as well as charity.
Christina and Christopher would later contest getting cut from the will and ultimately won
their case.
Since the publication of Mommie Dearest, the validity of the scenarios and details described
within it have been hotly debated, contested, and thoroughly dissected.
Fairbanks Jr, for one, said that the Joan Crawford that was depicted within the memoir
– despite the problems that he too had with her – was not the woman he had known and
once loved.
Christina has since published updated 20th and 30th-anniversary editions of the book.
Other memoirs about her mother, including Possessed and Not The Girl Next Door: Joan
Crawford, have been written by other authors in an attempt to discredit Christina's claims.
Of course, there was also that 1981 satirical film of the same name that starred Faye Dunaway.
Some of the most notable claims made in Mommie Dearest include the following:
Christina claims that when she and her brother, Christopher, were first adopted, they were
named Joan Jr and Phillip Terry Jr, after their adoptive father, but when Crawford's
marriage with Terry fell apart, she had the children renamed.
Christina wrote that her mother hated wire hangers.
On one occasion, as was famously depicted in the Mommie Dearest film, she woke Christina
up in the middle of the night and dragged her by the hair, screaming 'No wire hangers!'
while beating her profusely until her ears were ringing.
Christina also claims that her mother once shredded her favorite dress then forced her
to wear it for a week to humiliate her.
Beyond that, she insists that her mother would do things like starve her and her siblings,
tie them up to bedposts with something called a 'sleep safe' device and force them to clean
up messes they didn't make in the middle of the night for hours on end.
All of these alleged abuses led Christina to attempt suicide at the age of 15 while
at a boarding school.
After that event, she says that her mother never tried to contact her again or address
the situation.
How much of Christina's claims about her mother are true, we may never fully know.
But we can say for certain that the legacy of Joan Crawford has forever been marred.
Do you think that Joan Crawford really was as sinisterly abusive as her adoptive daughter
says she was, or do you tend to side with her first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who
thought that most of these accusations were overly sensationalized?
Let us know in the comments down below.
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