Joan Crawford, the most brilliant of Hollywood's stars, has reached the age of mental maturity, and today she is considered in Hollywood the lady of art, beauty, and intellect without rival. Among her colleagues of the older actresses, Joan still enjoys the greatest share of success. Recently Joan won, for her film Mildred Pierce, the Hollywood Academy's prize for acting and art, thereby proving that she is not one of those stars that go out when new planets and stars blaze in the sky — such as the star of the great actress Ingrid Bergman, about whom we published a word in our last issue.
Crawford is distinguished as being a woman of work, and she believes that success is work before it is genius. Asked about her program for the future, she said: Work... and I want to adopt six more children besides my two children, Christina and Christopher... and then I shall have to work a great deal to prepare for "the eight" a life of plenty and a happy living.
Even granting Crawford's theory that success comes by work and not by genius, no one can deny her her genius in art and in beauty. But she does not believe that she owes her success to her beauty and her art, but rather to her mastery of her work. She wants a person to be devoted to his profession, whatever it may be; and in devotion to work alone lies the road to glory.
Crawford is known for her intense passion for reading, and she owns the richest library in Hollywood. The great authors often present her with their books and novels inscribed in their own hand, and she takes pride in these presented books and counts them a great treasure.
Joan intends to adopt six more children alongside Christopher and Christina, and she says that tomorrow, when they number eight, they will together make up a basketball team.
She looks after the two children with the greatest care, and she does not sleep before sitting with them for an hour every night, reading to them and they reading to her. And she loves for the authors to present her with books inscribed in their own hand, so as to give the children a taste for books and for reading and for treasuring the works of thinkers — the first of her aims in education.
Surroundings such as Hollywood's are apt indeed to
stir up the fiercest kind of rivalry among actresses and actors, yet it appears that Crawford is of that breed of human beings who rise above the trifles of the noisy, petty life. In this important point of her conduct there is something truly worthy of admiration; indeed, she generously encourages those of talent.
She wakes at five o'clock in the morning and opens the windows to watch the morning sun. She loves a cloudy morning — as she says — and loves her face to bathe in the morning's mist; and she is content with seven hours of sleep a day.
... Do you not see that Joan Crawford is one of the lofty human natures? She is not an actress who appears on the screen so that people may amuse themselves for two hours!! She is a cultivated woman, polished by life, by experience, and by high breeding.
Crawford at home, between her two children, Christina and Christopher