HGB Ep. 520 - The Life and Afterlife of Joan Crawford

Moment in Oddity - Mr. Eat-All

Monsieur Mangetout (maanj-too) was Michel Lotito's entertainment name. Which, translated to English means 'Mr. Eat-all'. Lotito suffered from pica which is classified as an eating disorder where a person compulsively consumes non digestible material. Michel was examined by doctors and was found to possess an incredibly adaptable digestive system. His stomach lining and intestines were much thicker than the average human. Due to this, Monsieur Mangetout was able to consume metals and all sorts of indigestible items. However, he would do so in a cautious manner. Items Michel ate were always cut down to a smaller passable size and he kept his throat lubricated with mineral oil. This method allowed him to consume up to 2 pounds of metal each day. Throughout 'Mr. Eat All's' career, he consumed 18 bicycles, 7 TV sets, 2 beds, 15 grocery store carts, a computer, A COFFIN, a pair of skis and 6 chandeliers. His entertainment career culminated in eating a whole Cessna 150 airplane. It did take him 2 years to consume the entire plane, but regardless, that is pretty impressive. Unfortunately Lotito died of natural causes at the age of 57, but one thing is for sure, Michel's consuming of a whole Cessna airplane certainly is odd.  

This Month in History - The Dedication of the Pentagon

In the month of January, on the 15th, in 1943, the Pentagon building was dedicated. The building sits on 1,100 acres of land which once belonged to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The United States Federal Government confiscated the property during the Civil War. The idea of the Pentagon was suggested by Army Brig. Gen. Brehon Sommervell. He proposed it as a short term solution to the current War Department's lack of space while the likelihood of joining WWII was looming. Plans for the building were to utilize it for a hospital, office or warehouse after the culmination of WWII. The shape of the structure was said to have been designed due to the bordering of five adjacent roadways. The Pentagon was completed in 16 months using 435,000 yards of concrete, 43,000 tons of steel and 680,000 tons of sand and gravel. After WWII, officials determined that there was a justified need to retain a large military defense office. As such, the Pentagon continues to operate as a military command center to this day. 

The Life and Afterlife of Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford was an icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Her dramatic looks and stunning ability to take on any character, made her a highly sought after actress. The actress' reputation was marred though after her death when one of her adoptive daughters wrote a scathing memoir that became a movie depicting Crawford as a horrible mother who was mentally unstable and abusive. On this episode, we will journey through the life of Crawford. A life that was very complicated. And perhaps this is why there are rumors that Crawford's spirit might still be among us. 

Joan Crawford was born Lucille Fay LeSueur (Laysir) in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1905, or was it 1904 or maybe even 1906. No one is actually sure what year exactly she was born as Crawford was notorious for lying about her age as most women do, particularly when in showbiz and especially at that time. It's hard enough for actresses to get good, rich parts today when they are over the age of forty, so imagine during Hollywood's Golden Age. Her father was construction worker Thomas LeSueur and her mother was Anna Bell Johnson. Anna was a young mother and Lucille would be her second child with Thomas who left shortly after Lucille was born.  Her mother married theater owner Harry Cassin in 1909 and the family relocated to Lawton, Oklahoma where Cassin managed the Ramsey Opera House that hosted a variety of stage performances, including vaudeville acts. Lucille fell in love with what she was watching on stage and soon she was actually performing on stage, particularly for children. She went by the nickname Billie and for many years believed that her step-father Henry was actually her biological father. This marriage eventually ended in divorce as well.

Clearly, Crawford's childhood was tough. She had already been through two father figures, one of whom abandoned her and the other it turns out, was sexually abusing her and had embezzled money from the theater forcing the family to move to Kansas. Crawford was a strong-willed woman and that developed in her childhood, not only as just a core part of her character, but possibly as protection against the abuse and an onslaught of teasing. Her clothes were homemade and kids made fun of her at the private schools she attended. This got worse when her mother divorced Cassin and Billie then became a work student who had to clean and cook to compensate for her education. She suffered intense corporal punishment at school as well. The relationship with her mother wasn't great either as her mother was continuously comparing Joan to her older brother Hal and wondering why she couldn't be good like her brother. And, unfortunately, her mother blamed her for the sexual abuse.

Crawford attempted to attend college in 1922, but as some of us find, college really wasn't for her. Her education record was mainly faked because her workload at the private schools she attended kept her from being able to study or attend many classes. Dancing would become Crawford's entry to fame. She won several dancing competitions that she entered at the urging of her boyfriend at the time, Ray Sterling, and she eventually joined a traveling revue as a dancer under her birth name of Lucille LeSueur. During this time, she did do some things to help pay the bills that would come back to haunt her. She was filmed dancing nude and performed in peep shows and after moving to Chicago, she started work as a stripper. She was arrested for prostitution during this time. In 1924, she made another move to Detroit and there she got work as a chorus girl and this is when she was discovered by a Broadway producer there named J. J. Shubert. He offers her a job on Broadway and Crawford moved to New York City.

Her first husband would come along after she hit the stage on Broadway. This was saxophone player James Welton. The marriage was short-lived, but not much is known about it because Crawford didn't talk about it. Crawford loved New York City and she would say of her time there that the big city felt like home to her. Crawford did a screen test at the end of 1924, which was viewed by Hollywood producer Harry Rapf. He took the test to MGM, which promptly offered Crawford a contract making $75 a week. Crawford jumped at the chance and borrowed $400, so she could move to California. Her first job in Hollywood was serving as a body double for Norma Shearer, who was MGM's top talent at the time. Crawford was credited under her birth name. By the end of 1925, she had appeared in five films.

The publicity head for MGM, Pete Smith, didn't care for the name Lucille LeSueur because it sounded like "sewer" to him. A "Name the Star" contest was held, which came up with the name Joan Arden. Another actress had that name, so the secondary name of Crawford was chosen. Crawford didn't care for the name. She preferred Jo-Anne to Joan and Crawford sounded like "crawfish" to her. Then Crawford set out to promote herself because she felt that she should be getting better than just bit parts. MGM screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas said of Crawford, "No one decided to make Joan Crawford a star. Joan Crawford became a star because Joan Crawford decided to become a star." In 1927, she appeared in the film "The Unknown" with Lon Chaney, Sr. and she considered him to be a mentor saying, "It was then I became aware for the first time of the difference between standing in front of a camera, and acting." Her big break came in 1928 with the film "Our Dancing Daughters." This was a flapper themed silent movie and people compared her to the It girl, Clara Bow. Crawford made for the perfect star. She had large blue eyes, dark eyebrows, wide mouth, broad shoulders and a slim figure.

With this success, Joan was able to purchase the home that she would live in for most of her life. This was a 10 room house at 426 N. Bristol Avenue that she heard about from a contractor friend of her brother Hal. She paid $57,500 for it and the original design was in the Spanish villa style. The house would be renovated many times and go through a complete style change to  Georgian in the mid-1930s. The original interiors featured tile flooring, wrought iron accents and exposed stained wood ceiling beams. Much of the furniture was primitive, but it would become more formal as the tile floors were covered with bright-colored rugs and the exposed wood was painted. Joan was dating several men at the time that she bought the house, but the one that she really latched onto was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The couple married in June 1929, and Crawford officially dubbed the house "El JoDo," a combination of the names Joan and Douglas. She had obviously gotten the idea from Pickfair. And yes, just like Pickfair, it turns out that this house will have some haunts of its own.

Joan Crawford loved men and being engaged or married didn't stop her from having affairs. She carried on quite a few during her marriage to Fairbanks and eventually they divorced in 1933. Part of the issues in the marriage also included a resentment that Crawford had for Fairbanks lack of will or trying when it came to acting. She basically had to swim in the gutter before her rise to fame and he took the fact that his father was famous for granted and he wasn't very committed to his career. She began an extensive remodel of the house after this and also added a pool house and theater to the backyard with the pool between the two buildings. There were also two rooms added to the house. The theater served the purpose of giving Joan a place to practice being live on stage and she would invite her friends as an audience. When Talkies took over Hollywood, Crawford transitioned perfectly. Her voice was thought to be alluring and critics complimented her talking and singing.

The next major love of Crawford's life would be Clark Gable. They had a love affair that lasted for twenty years, off and on. They met on the set of "Dance Fools, Dance" in 1931. After that film, Gable and Crawford made two more films that year and that success placed Crawford among MGM's top female stars. Gable and Crawford would make eight films together in total and she would say of Gable that he was the only man that she really loved. The 1930s was incredibly successful for Joan. She married her third husband Franchot Tone in 1935. Tone turned out to be an alcoholic who was incredibly jealous of her fame and he physically abused her throughout their marriage. Make-up artists would have to work wonders to cover the bruises she would receive. Crawford left Tone in 1939 after he cheated on her.

The Hollywood Reporter released an ad in 1938 that declared Joan Crawford "Box Office Poison" along with other female stars like Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Greta Garbo. The list was put together by the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association of America, Harry Brandt, and his reasoning behind doing this was that these actresses were making more money than they were worth as reflected by ticket sales. Later, it would come out that some actors were on the list as well. This basically was a movie exhibitor who was having issues with making money and box-office flops. We would concur that Hollywood artists make way more money than they should, but that's the world we live in. Being dubbed "Box Office Poison" hit Joan hard and she had trouble getting work for a while and her next couple of movies flopped. She had a comeback in 1939. 

Christina Crawford was Joan's first child that she adopted in 1940. She had been unable to carry a pregnancy to term, so she turned to adoption. She originally named Christina Joan after herself, but then changed her mind. The adoption had to go through Las Vegas because California wouldn't allow a single woman to adopt a child. Crawford married actor Phillip Terry in 1942 and they adopted a boy they named Christopher. The biological parents wanted him back after a year, so Joan had to give him up and then those parents turned around and sold him to another couple for $250. Crawford would always consider Christopher to be one of her children since she had raised him for a year. She and Phillip adopted another boy who they named for Phillip, but after the couple divorced in 1946, Crawford changed Phillip Jr.'s name to Christopher. 

MGM and Crawford terminated their contract together after 18 years in 1945 and Joan signed with Warner Brothers. Her first film with the studio was Mildred Pierce in 1945, which was a smash hit for Warner Brothers and earned Crawford the win for Best Actress for her roll in it. She didn't attend the Oscars because she thought she would lose and told everyone that she was too ill to go. After she heard that she won, she had her make-up and hair done and conducted a photo shoot of her accepting the Oscar in bed. 

In January 1947, Crawford adopted twin girls, Cindy and Cathy from the Tennessee Children's Home Society, an unlicensed orphanage and it turned out to be a horrible place. The owner, Georgia Tan skimmed 90% of the fees for her lifestyle. Many of the babies were stolen from unwed mothers. After bringing the twins home, Crawford would begin to have a drinking problem. In 1952, Joan left Warner Brothers and basically worked as a free agent, which didn't go well. She had trouble finding work and so she left Hollywood for awhile and married Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele in May of 1955. The couple split their time between the Bristol Avenue house and Manhattan, New York, where they owned a penthouse apartment at 2 East 70th Street. The apartment would eventually become Crawford's full-time residence, but she wouldn't sell the Bristol house until 1960. Crawford became very active with Pepsi and she traveled extensively opening up bottling plants and doing other promotional things around the country. Crawford would say that she probably traveled 100,000 miles for Pepsi.

Joan's mother died in 1959 and although the mother and daughter had a strained relationship, it hit Joan hard. Shortly after that, Alfred died from a heart attack and Joan was devastated. Joan was elected to the Board of Directors for Pepsi after Alfred's death and she would remain there until 1973 when she retired.  Joan began acting again after Alfred's death because he had left her nearly penniless. And that was a great thing for us because 1961 brought a script to Crawford entitled, "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Crawford took on the part of Blanche Hudson who had once been an A-list star, but now was elderly and disabled and under the care of her psychotic sister Jane. Crawford suggested that the part of Jane be given to Bette Davis. Many people were shocked as they thought the actresses hated each other, but they maintained that they never had a feud. Which was not true. Rumors claim that Davis even kicked Crawford so hard in the head on set, that Crawford needed stitches. 

The film was a huge success and Crawford had her second comeback. Davis was nominated for an Academy Award. Another rumor about the rivalry claims that Crawford was upset that she hadn't been nominated. Anne Bancroft had been nominated in the Best Actress category, but she wasn't going to be able to attend the Oscars, so Crawford called her up and asked if she could accept the award on Bancroft's behalf if she were to win. So Anne did win Best Actress and Crawford did accept the award for her. Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange starred in the FX docudrama entitled "Feud" in 2017, which was inspired by the purported feud between the women. Creator Ryan Murphy had interviewed Bette Davis for four hours back in 1989 and he said it was clear that Davis hated Crawford, but that she greatly respected her talent.

We love the old Night Gallery series as we are sure many listeners do as well, and Crawford appeared in the 1969 film that served as the pilot for the series. BTW, Steven Spielberg was the director. It was the first time he directed a star of that caliber. Joan was presented the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes in 1970. Crawford would act for the last time in 1972 on a television episode of The Sixth Sense. Her last public appearance was on April 8, 1973 at a sold out event at Town Hall in Manhattan, New York presenting John Springer's series "Legendary Ladies." A series of clips from Crawford's screen career were shared and then she did a question and answer afterward. Joan moved to a smaller apartment, made an appearance at a book party in 1974 and things went south for Crawford. By 1977, she was too weak to care for her Shih Tzu dog and she gave her away. Four days later, on May 10, 1977, she had a massive heart attack and passed in her apartment in New York City. She was reported to be 69-years-old, but was probably closer to 73.

Joan's funeral was held at Campbell Funeral Home in New York. Her will left $77,500 to both twins Cindy and Cathy and Christina and Christopher were both disinherited. The will said, "It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son, Christopher, or my daughter, Christina, for reasons which are well known to them." The two challenged the will and received a $55,000 settlement. Crawford was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery and Mausoleum. But that was not the end of Joan Crawford's legacy or time here on this dimension. The next major stop on the Joan Crawford timeline would have to be the movie "Mommie Dearest." For listeners who are our age, meaning you grew up in the 1980s, you more than likely watched this movie or heard about it. 

The 1981 movie was based on the 1978 controversial tell-all written by Christina Crawford. It was her revenge on her mother for leaving her out of the will. The book depicted Joan as an alcoholic who was cruel and unbalanced. Joan's friends all denounced the book as fiction and lies and even her rival Bette Davis said, "I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan, but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. Horrible." Cindy and Cathy Crawford also said that the book was all lies. Joan was known to be a strict mother and could be controlling, but the stories of beatings were over the top. The movie sensationalized the claims in the book even more, to the point that the movie came across as campy and over the top with Faye Dunaway's performance remembered as overblown, rather than Oscar worthy. 

Faye Dunaway was an obvious pick to play Joan. Crawford herself had said, "Of all the actresses, to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star." Dunaway felt that she was the only one brave enough to take on the role. She wrote, "The general sentiment in the industry was that anyone who played Christina’s version of Crawford would pay a price for taking on one of Hollywood’s great legends." When Roger Ebert saw Dunaway in her make-up on the set, he said, "My god, she looks just like Joan Crawford." The make-up took seven hours to apply and the make-up artist Lee Herman used a Q-tip to cross-reference Dunaway's face with Crawford's. The resemblance was spooky, but that wasn't all that was spooky about the set of the movie. There are claims that Joan Crawford haunted the set. 

Dunaway's behavior became increasingly more erratic during production and some people wondered if she was a woman possessed. At the time, Dunaway was caring for her infant son and people thought perhaps the pressure and sleep deprivation were getting to her. Dunaway wrote in her memoir "Looking For Gatsby" that, "A week into production the role really began troubling me. It is difficult to spend the day inside a character that is so dark, and not easy to shed the emotions, like the costumes and makeup, at the end of the day. At night I would go home…and feel Crawford in the room with me, this tragic, haunted soul just hanging around.” She describes "a chilly presence, a coming-in-and-sitting-on-the-window-ledge sort of thing."

One of the weird things that happened on the set was that Dunaway suddenly lost her voice during a screaming scene - yes, THAT scene about the wire hangers. People had said that Dunaway's performance made it seem as though Crawford had loaned her voice to Faye for 12 weeks. There was speculation that this was Crawford taking back her voice during a scene that she particularly didn't like. An entire reel of film also came out completely blank and no one knew why. And some of Crawford's gowns went missing. The movie opened to horrible reviews and audiences erupting into raucous laughter. Perhaps the influence of Crawford's ghost had an effect.

The Bristol House was said to be haunted as well. Crawford sold it to actor Donald O'Connor in 1960. He did some extensive renovations and in 1975 sold the property to investor Gary Berwin. He sold the house to actor/producer Anthony Newley. The house was sold again in June of 1981, to Texas developers Robert and Nancy Crow. The couple divorced in 1984 and Nancy got the house. There was a slight fire on the second floor that did a bit of damage that was quickly repaired. Crow sold the house in 1996 for over $1.5 million and the new owner divided the property into two parcels and part towards the back of the property was sold and a house was built on it in 2011. The pool house and theater that had been there before were demolished. It is believed that the owner that Crow sold to is still the current owner. And we are left to wonder if that owner has experienced anything. But that is not the case in regards to the time when Crawford lived there. 

Brad and Sherry Steiger were experts on the unexplained and conducted a lot of paranormal investigations and research. Joan Crawford's house was one of the places they wrote about in their 1990 book "Hollywood and the Supernatural." They approached Christina to ask her about rumors of hauntings at the Bristol House and she seemed surprised that they had heard about the weird activity. She told them, "I have vivid memories of some things, but when you are severely abused, you tend to block out other things. I'm positive that there were manifestations occurring when I was little. I saw them! There
were places in the house that were always so cold that nobody ever wanted to go in them. As a child, I was always told that I had an active and vivid imagination; I was always scared by things, but people just told me that I just had an 'active imagination.' Years later, I thought, oh well, maybe that was good to have had an active imagination, and I became a writer because of that."

"But as a child, I saw things in the house! There was, of course, no context or framework in which to put what I saw and felt. I had nobody to speak to about the occurrences. Any time I would become extremely frightened and would get out of my bed to try and find somebody, I was always treated as though I were
just being a 'bad child' that didn't want to go to sleep. I always expressed my fear to my mother because it was she that I went to find to help me ... because I would be very upset and I'd be crying. I used to have terrible nightmares and that kind of thing, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that I saw things in the night; so the solution to that finally was just to leave the lights on everywhere. One of the things I saw seemed like an apparition of a child ... or children, but as I said, I may have blotted out a lot.

The Steigers wrote, "Christina told us that she had not been back to the house since she was seventeen. Christina recalled her last day there, 'I remember the woman who had taken care of me and my two younger sisters since I was four years old just watching me, without saying a word. I was going from room to room in the house, without saying anything, just standing in the middle of each room, then going on to the next one. She finally asked me what I was doing. I told her that I would never see this house again, therefore, I was saying goodbye to it. Many years after I had left, we met again. She was now an elderly woman and had retired. We always had been quite close. She told me she had always remembered the look on my face when I said my goodbyes to the house. It seemed a strange thing to do, to say, 'I'll never see this house again,' when at that time there was absolutely no inkling of the house being sold. In fact, it was not sold for another two and a half to three years, and, indeed, I never have been back.'"

At the time of the interview, Christina had heard that the current owners of the house had called in the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere of the Healing Light Center to work with the house. The Steigers wrote that Christina said, "Rosalyn described what she had seen in the house when she went there. She picked up on some things that astounded me because they seemed to validate what I may have seen and experienced when I was little. It gave me goose bumps when Rosalyn told me that she discovered so many spirits in the house and there had been signs of ritual abuse in one of the rooms. Many of the spirits had 'underworld' connections. I was sent to boarding school when I was ten years old. I came home infrequently after that. I always believed that I was sent away partly because I was too much the eyes and ears to the world--a witness. I saw too much, I guess. Some of the things that I saw that were going on were very violent. Her [Joan Crawford's] relationship with men, a number of men, was extremely violent. I was getting too old, and I was beginning to understand what was going on.

That house is so weird! Now, evidently, the walls are starting to catch fire! Other people have heard children's cries in the walls! Every single owner has had trouble. The first one was Crawford. She built the majority of the house. It was a small cottage when she bought it, but most of the house, she built. She sold it to Donald O'Connor, who sold it to the Anthony Newleys. They sold it, I think, to the current owner, who is a friend of the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere, and they asked her to "work" on the house. Every single family that has lived in that house has had horrible things happen . . . illnesses, alcoholism, addictions, relationship problems, and now, evidently with the current owner, the walls are breaking out in flames! I've heard that in particular it's the wall that was behind Crawford's bed."

Christina went on to remind the Steigers of what she wrote in "Mommie Dearest" about her mother's final moments. A woman had been praying for Joan at the foot of her bed  and she said to the woman, "Don't you dare ask God to help me!" And then she died. Christina felt that this interaction revealed Crawford's arrogance and she believed that was partly why the house seemed cursed. She said, "And that has nothing to do with me! So it would not surprise me in the least if the "haunting" spirit that is in the house is Crawford! She was capable of real evil. If you have never experienced that "look" from another human being, it is almost impossible to believe that such an experience could even exist! I think perhaps that's why so many people are unwilling to deal with the shadow side because they can't really get themselves to believe that such a dimension exists. My brother and I were absolutely terrified of her. In fact, there is
a passage in Mommie Dearest that describes ('the look" on her face) when she tried to kill me when I was thirteen. We all saw "that look." My brother and I talked about it extensively ... it was not of an ordinary human being!"

The Steigers talked to the Reverend Rosalyn Bruyere of the Healing Light Center and she told them, "It is true that the house was afflicted with spontaneous fires, primarily in the wall behind where Joan Crawford's bed used to be. However, I did not pick up that Joan Crawford's ghost was there." Bruyere felt that the house had a presence or something before Crawford moved in and that her chaotic remodelings and constant building onto and changing of the house, led to chaos for this presence. Like the Winchester Mystery House. Bruyere said, "Nothing is where it should be. She added dining rooms and hallways that led to other dining rooms. It all combines to form an H-shaped house. Turn a corner and you're lost." For this reason, the healer felt that the haunting was multi-layered.

Bruyere said, "It was a place of conspicuous negativity. I called it an 'Astral Central,' a gathering of spirits that were attracted to the negative vibrations. People had been tied up and tortured in that house. I picked up on gangland figures, corrupt politicians. There is an area in the house where a child [not Christina] had been tortured and molested. Terrible things went on in that house."Once the Beverly Hills Fire Department spent four days there attempting to solve the mystery of the spontaneous fires that would break out on the walls. I feel the spirits were trying to burn the house down to protect some horrible secret. There is something hidden there. I am certain that there are bodies buried in that basement." The healer claimed to have cleared the house.

The Steigers decided to visit the house for themselves and they wrote, "When we [authors Brad and Sherry] visited the former Crawford home in the early 1990s, the current owners graciously allowed us to enter to film a segment for an HBO special on haunted Hollywood. The couple told us that they had experienced some mysterious pyrotechnic phenomena and had witnessed quite a number of apparitions of quite a wide variety of entities in various parts of the home. The couple said that the small cottage next to the swimming pool very often seemed to be the center of haunting phenomena. We kept in touch with the couple for quite some time. It was not long after we had filmed in the Crawford home that they decided to move. We have no comment from them whether or not it was because of any haunting phenomena."

There's this Ghost Box Session on YouTube supposedly with Joan Crawford. There was an interesting exchange where the woman asking the questions asked, "I hope this isn't too sensitive of a subject, but your daughter Christina wrote a very controversial [Voice asks, "What has she done?"] tell all memoir, that you probably know about. How did you feel about that? Were you upset and are you still upset?" [Voice asks, "Now what have you done?"] The woman asked if she had seen Bette Davis on the other side and what sounded like a male voice seemed to be asking who Bette Davis was. "Bette Davis" was very clear. There was also a voice that seemed to sing "Tina." Could this be short for Christina?

We want to end this episode sharing a quote from the amazing Jessica Lange who portrayed Crawford in "Bette and Joan." Lange said, "[Joan's] brutal childhood was masked by the beautiful, impenetrable veneer of this great, gorgeous movie star...so she was always on, which is a tremendous burden in and of itself, but always there was this thing lurking underneath of being this poverty-stricken, abused, unloved, abandoned young child and woman." We think her life really reflects this accessment. Is it possible that Joan Crawford's spirit is still lurking just beneath the living world? That is for you to decide!