Free Bette and Joan The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine Page A

manor that eventually caused the opening rift between Joan and Doug. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons when they visited, it was the custom for Doug Sr. and Jr. to take off for a spot of tennis or golf at their club, leaving Joan alone in the main drawing room, knitting and crocheting, while Lady Mary remained upstairs in the main bedroom, napping. "One Sunday afternoon," said one source, "while Mary napped and the men played golf, a lonely Joan stood at the window, and realized it was Lucille LeSueur or Billie Cassin who was meekly waiting for her betters to drift in and toss her a few leftovers of love." Reverting to her former self, Joan said, "F__ this." She set her jaw, went to the hall phone, and called for her own car.
     
    Another item of dissension between the couple was the disparity in their careers. Equal when they married, Joan's career escalated while Doug's lagged behind, at a pace of his choosing. "Movies are not the end-all and be-all of life," he said, words of blasphemy to Joan. "Doug never had to fight his way up the way I had, and had no taste for it either," she stated. He lacked her discipline and could not understand why they had to be in bed at ten each night when she was working. The tension in their marriage increased when Joan was making
Grand Hotel.
Burdened with the double duty of playing Flaemmchen, her first serious role, and the strain of trying to derail the indomitable Garbo, Crawford would come home and yell at her ebullient and always cheerful husband. "Don't talk to me," she would say, only to cry out minutes later, "For God's sake, say something!"
     
    She was "a creature of her mood," Doug wrote in
Vanity Fair.
"When she is depressed she falls into an all-consuming depth of melancholy, out of which it is practically impossible to recover her. At these times she has long crying spells. When it is over she is like a flower that has had a sprinkling of rain and then blossoms out in brighter colors."
     
    Doug also had his gloomy moments and neuroses, Joan claimed. "He might be painting. Suddenly he would think of a suit he hadn't worn in two or three years. Everything would be dropped until I found the suit for him. If we couldn't find it, he would go into his closet and throw every suit out in the middle of the floor, until he found the one he wanted."
     
    While America wept and sympathized with Joan or Doug or both because they couldn't make their fairy-tale marriage work, a few jaundiced members of the press and the Hollywood establishment, including Bette Davis, snorted "Bullsugar!" The main reason for the split was the extracurricular hanky-panky the pair had been practicing for the past two years. "Chiseling with an extra girl, with whom he was seen motoring in broad daylight on Wilshire Boulevard," Doug was said to be busy on his own, while Joan carried on a lengthy torrid affair with M-G-M's hottest new leading man, Clark Gable.
     
    "Yes, Clark and I had an affair, a
glorious affair, and it went on a
lot longer than anybody knows.
He was a wonderful man. Very
simple, pretty much the way he
was painted ... forever the
virile, ballsy folk hero."
    —JOAN CRAWFORD
    "Peasants by nature," she and Gable had a lot in common, said Joan. He was once called Billie (born William C. Gable). Both grew up poor, ignored, and uneducated. Both became M-G-M stars, glamorous, popular, durable; both had a compulsion about cleanliness. "He won't take a bath because he can't sit in water he's sat in. He will only shower, and does so several times a day. His bed linens must be changed several times a day. He shaves under his arms. He is so immaculately groomed and dressed, you could eat off him," said author Lyn Tornabene.
     
    Gable arrived in Hollywood in 1925, the same year as Crawford. They appeared as extras in
The Merry Widow
but never met. Handsome and ambitious, intent on getting launched in pictures, the actor, it was said, "accommodated anyone important who could help his career." Coached by