Before she became one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Joan Crawford was a girl from Texas trying to escape a painful childhood. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, she was abandoned by her father before her first birthday. Her mother remarried, and for a time, the family’s connection to the opera world exposed young Lucille to glamour and art. But that period of excitement was shattered when, around age 11, her stepfather began mistreating her.
Home no longer felt safe, and Lucille began searching for a way out. She left school and a relationship behind in 1922 to chase a career as a dancer, gambling everything on a life in show business. The gamble paid off. Lucille landed small parts in Hollywood films, but studio executives decided her name was not fit for a star.
MGM held a nationwide contest to rename her, and although “Joan Arden” won, it was already in use. The studio settled on Joan Crawford, a name she reportedly never liked but would make unforgettable. Her early days in Hollywood were humbling. In the 1925 film *Lady of the Night*, she was used as a body double for Norma Shearer, the studio’s biggest female star.
Crawford hated being second, and she quickly built a reputation for fierce ambition, fighting for every opportunity and clashing with rivals. That rivalry with Norma Shearer was personal. Shearer was married to studio executive Irving Thalberg, and Crawford resented what she saw as an unfair advantage. Hollywood also buzzed with rumors about how far Crawford would go to succeed, including an alleged affair with married director Vincent Sherman.
Through it all, Crawford refused to wait for the studio to promote her. She entered dance contests, courted photographers, and made sure her name stayed in the papers. One screenwriter later summed up her rise best: she became a star because she decided she was going to become one. That decision paid off in 1928 with *Our Dancing Daughters*.
The film made Crawford a major star almost overnight, turning her into the era’s newest “it girl. ” But fame introduced new pressures. In 1929, she married Douglas Fairbanks Jr. , the son of Hollywood royalty.
Her new in-laws reportedly wanted little to do with her, and her relationship with Mary Pickford, her husband’s stepmother, was especially tense. Crawford felt like an outsider in her own marriage, but she channeled her energy into preparing for the future. Knowing the industry was shifting to sound, she worked relentlessly to erase her southwestern accent, reading aloud for hours until her voice matched the polished image she was crafting. By 1932, Crawford was the third-highest-grossing star in Hollywood.
Her career soared, but her marriage crumbled. Both she and Fairbanks were reportedly involved with others. Crawford began an affair with Clark Gable, and the two behaved with startling openness. At one party, a writer reportedly discovered them in an intimate moment behind a bandstand.
Crawford greeted her with complete confidence and, the next day, sent flowers with a playful note. When her marriage to Fairbanks ended in 1933, Crawford cited grievous mental cruelty. She moved on quickly, marrying actor Franchot Tone in 1935. That marriage was troubled from the start.
Tone preferred serious theater to the Hollywood fame Crawford wanted for him. She pushed him to embrace stardom, but the harder she tried, the more their marriage unraveled. Crawford suffered two devastating miscarriages, and Tone reportedly sank into depression and heavy drinking. Their arguments turned violent, with Tone physically attacking Crawford.
It was a horrifying echo of the abuse she had endured as a child. In 1939, she divorced him. Her career was also wobbling. In May 1938, a widely discussed article labeled Crawford “box office poison,” claiming her salary no longer matched her drawing power.
For a woman who had built her life on public approval, it was a brutal humiliation. The 1940s brought motherhood. After years of struggling, Crawford adopted a baby girl she named Christina. In 1942, she married actor Phillip Terry after only six months of dating.
The couple adopted a baby boy named Christopher, but his biological mother reclaimed him. Crawford was devastated. She and Terry adopted another boy, initially named Phillip Terry Jr. , but after their 1946 divorce, Crawford changed his name to Christopher, seemingly trying to replace the child she had lost.
In 1945, Crawford set her sights on the lead role in *Mildred Pierce*. Director Michael Curtiz did not want her, viewing her as a fading star and openly disliking her trademark broad-shouldered look. At one point, he reportedly interrupted a costume fitting and physically inspected her clothing to make sure she wasn’t secretly wearing the shoulder pads he hated. Crawford fought for the role and won.
The film was a major success, and at the 1946 Academy Awards, she won the Oscar for Best Actress. She wasn’t there. Convinced Ingrid Bergman would win, she stayed home. When the news arrived, Crawford sprang into action, had her makeup team prepare her, and arranged for photographers to capture the moment.
By morning, images of Crawford celebrating her Oscar were in the papers. Her personal life grew more complicated. In 1947, she 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 reputation for being difficult also hardened.
During the filming of *Johnny Guitar* in 1954, she clashed with co-star Mercedes McCambridge, who had personal history with Crawford: Crawford had been involved with McCambridge’s husband. After a night of drinking, Crawford reportedly threw McCambridge’s clothing onto a highway. The two traded public insults. In 1962, Crawford was cast with Bette Davis in *Whatever Happened to Baby Jane*.
The two managed to finish the film, but the rivalry exploded afterward. Davis mocked Crawford’s romantic history, and Crawford mocked Davis’s acting style. Then came the 1963 Academy Awards. Davis was nominated for Best Actress; Crawford was not.
Crawford contacted the other nominees and offered to accept the Oscar on their behalf if they couldn’t attend. Several agreed. When Anne Bancroft won for *The Miracle Worker* and wasn’t at the ceremony, Crawford walked onstage and accepted the award, standing before Davis in the audience. Years later, Davis offered a deeper explanation for their hatred: Franchot Tone.
Davis had been deeply in love with him, but Crawford married him instead. In 1955, Crawford married Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi. When he died of a heart attack four years later, the company expected her to step aside. She refused, threatened gossip columnist Louella Parsons with exposing what she knew about Pepsi, and secured a seat on the board.
By the late 1960s, however, her career was fading. During rehearsals for *The Lucy Show* in 1968, her drinking was so serious she struggled to remember her lines. Producers nearly replaced her, but she pulled through. Her need for control was legendary.
She demanded extreme cleanliness, kept her home covered in plastic, and reportedly answered every piece of fan mail herself. Crawford’s drinking worsened in her later years. In 1974, she passed out, fell, and badly injured her face. Frightened, she stopped drinking completely that year after embracing Christian Science.
After seeing photographs of herself from a party in the 1970s, she was reportedly horrified and withdrew from public life. In 1973, Pepsi removed her from its board, and for perhaps the only time in her life, she did not fight back. Crawford died of a heart attack on May 10, 1977, at the age of 73. Crawford’s story has long been connected to another Hollywood legend: Judy Garland.
Garland was married five times, and two of her husbands, director Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron, were widely reported to have had relationships with men. Herron reportedly maintained a long-term relationship with actor Henry Brandon that continued before and after his short marriage to Garland. These unions have often been described as “lavender marriages,” arrangements that allowed celebrities to protect their public images in an era when being openly gay could destroy a career. Garland’s deep connection to gay culture has been explained in two very different ways.
Scholar José Muñoz described “disidentification,” the process by which LGBTQ+ people take stories never created for them and reshape them into something personally meaningful. A gay man watching Garland could see his own struggles in her life: the pressure, rejection, and constant battle for acceptance. Historian David Halperin offered a different view. He argued that many gay men become deeply critical of mainstream representations of gay life, which are often packaged for straight approval.
Instead, they may connect more authentically with figures who exist outside those boundaries. Garland became a gay icon not because she was secretly part of the gay community, but because her vulnerability and outsider status gave generations of gay men something they could recognize in themselves.
