Free Possessed by Donald Spoto

was arrested in Santa Barbara and sent home to his mother. On July 12, 1929, he was arrested for drunk driving and causing injuries to the occupant of another vehicle.
    This mishap occurred six days after his first legal marriage, to the nineteen-year-old actress Muriel Evans. That union was soon dissolved, and Michael subsequently married a dancer named Jacklyn Roth. He again revealed himself to be an unsuitable mate, and the second marriage ended in 1937. In 1941, at the age of thirty-three, Cudahy married Marjorie Conover, a former Mack Sennett bathing beauty. Three months later, he suddenly abandoned her and entered the U.S. Army. In 1945 he returned from war service to life in Hollywood, where—at the age of thirty-eight, on February 15, 1947—he died at Hollywood Hospital. The cause was “a chronic liver complaint,” according to the New York Times, which added: “He was known in the film colony as a playboy"—true, but poor journalism. As for the discarded wife Marjorie, a deranged Hollywood real estate salesman murdered her in 1952. Joan maycertainly have reasoned that she was well rid of this tragic, self-destructive man in 1926.
    “I’M SO SORRY I made such a dreadful mistake,” Joan wrote to a friend, referring to her next picture, The Boob. “You don’t have to tell me it was a terrible picture—I won’t even go to see the preview!” Her judgment was accurate: it was a dreary attempt at humor, in which she had the small role of Jane, “one of Uncle Sam’s revenue agents,” according to the intertitle card. Helping to round up a gang of escaping bootleggers, she appears very late in the picture and merely stands by, looking official. The critical consensus: The Boob was “a piece of junk.”
    Joan’s memories mostly had to do with her director, William A. Wellman, later perhaps best known for The Public Enemy, the first version of A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred. Wellman had been a hell-raising juvenile delinquent, and he never kicked the habit. In Hollywood, he was predisposed to offend actresses especially, by rudely grabbing, pinching and fondling them. “He was a horny wise-guy with little respect for women,” according to Joan. Wellman’s astonishing justification: “She had a reputation in those early days as quite a wild slut, so what did she expect?”
    EIGHT FILMS WITH JOAN Crawford went before the cameras in 1927. “I worked my ass off that year, didn’t I?” she asked rhetorically many years later. “MGM was a goddam factory!” In Winners of the Wilderness, set during the French and Indian Wars, Joan portrayed a general’s daughter, but she felt overwhelmed by the lavish eighteenth-century costumes. Its January release was followed two weeks later by the premiere of The Taxi Dancer, notable as the first time Joan received top billing. The title refers not (as commonly thought) to a prostitute but to a young woman paid to dance with paying partners at a club—the so-called ten-cents-a-dance girls who socialized with male dancers. “I was better than the picture,” she said, and most reviewers agreed: “Joan Crawford rides high over the inferior material. Here is a girl of singularbeauty and promise, and she certainly has IT"—a reference to novelist Elinor Glyn’s term for sex appeal. Joan’s wardrobe and character were simpler in The Understanding Heart, first shown at the end of February, in which she played a lookout for the Forest Rangers who becomes involved in a sizzling love triangle that blazes during a raging fire. Time magazine dismissed the picture as “so befuddled that it is incomprehensible.”
    But Joan’s sense of herself and her career was much clarified by an important introduction to a key Hollywood figure that season. Gloria Swanson had long been Joan’s idol—not just as an actress, but as a model of how a star behaved. “I have decided,” Gloria had said, “that when I am a star, I will be every inch and at every moment a star. Everyone