If there’s a Hollywood movie about a family anything like the one that Crawford was raised in, I haven’t seen it. Eyman searched in vain for any public record of her birth and attributes the lack of a birth certificate to either the family’s poverty or to their instability. He estimates that she was born in 1905 or 1906, possibly near San Antonio or in San Angelo, Texas. Her name was Lucille LeSueur. Her father, Thomas LeSueur, left the family around the time of her birth, and, in 1909, her mother, Anna, married Henry Cassin, a theatre manager in Lawton, Oklahoma, and moved the family there. In Lawton, Lucille was known as Billie Cassin—Billie was Cassin’s nickname for her—and she was a rambunctious child, recalled by neighbors as a “complete tomboy” and by others as malnourished. She loved vaudeville shows and movies; Cassin encouraged her to consider a career as a dancer, and she took to standing in front of the Lawton movie theatre and telling friends, “My picture will be up there one day.”

In the mid-nineteen-tens, Cassin got into financial trouble, and the family relocated to Kansas City, where Lucille worked her way through two private schools. In 1922, she enrolled at Stephens College, in Columbia, Missouri, paying for her tuition by working in the dining hall. She lasted only a semester—her educational background was inadequate, and she felt ostracized for her menial work—but she blossomed socially. A classmate said that she’d “dance all the time on the tables in the dining room and do the Charleston in the kitchen”; she became known as the town’s best Charleston dancer. And a staff member said, of Lucille, “She liked to date, and she liked the men a lot.” Her failure in college proved to be her success in life and art.

Returning to Kansas City, Lucille got a job in a department store, until, around the start of 1924, she was cast in a show as a dancer. After that show closed, she moved to Chicago, barged into a producer’s office, and got hired to dance at a night club popular with gangsters. Then the producer cast her in a show, in Oklahoma City, and in another, in Detroit, where she came to the attention of a stage manager, who hired her to dance on Broadway. She débuted there in May, and by November a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer in New York had called her up for a screen test. Back in Kansas City with her mother for Christmas, and less than a year after first setting foot on a stage, she got a telegram from the studio summoning her to Hollywood and offering a six-month contract.

The studio promoted Lucille with a publicity campaign that included a movie-magazine contest to find her a new name. The magazine’s editor chose Joan Crawford, which she hated—she would ask friends to call her Billie—but the renaming helped, not only commercially but, even more, psychologically. The new public persona became her creation, even her product, and she worked madly to put it over. She got her face and her name out there as quickly and as brashly as possible. Dressed and coiffed showily, she entered (and won) dance contests in prominent restaurants that were attended by Hollywood higher-ups. A female screenwriter said, “Crude as she was, everything about her seemed to say, ‘Look out. I’m in a hurry.  Make room.’ ” It was still the era of silent films, and Crawford made the most of the small roles that came her way, hanging around sets even when she wasn’t shooting, in order to learn from famous actors and skilled technicians. While acting in “Sally, Irene and Mary,” as the high-spirited and earnestly romantic member of the titular trio, Crawford learned from the cameraman John Arnold to forget what was rehearsed and to create a sense of surprise on camera. He also taught her what kind of shot mattered the most; as she recalled, “A face up close like that has such strength.”

Once Crawford slipped into her style, she never slipped out of it—not publicly. “Never in the thousands of times in our association, was she ever less than perfectly dressed, in full makeup,” a publicist at M-G-M recalled. “She was never casual, not even if it was for an audience of only 20 fans. She had an image of herself and she lived up to it.” (Moreover, Eyman notes that the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, “allowed Crawford to keep the clothes from her movies so she could look like a star at all times, and on the studio’s dime.”) Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., (whom she married in 1929 and divorced in 1933), said, “She was the hardest worker I ever saw. Her only excess I can remember was an excess of ambition. She was completely absorbed with her career and with work.”

Eyman’s thesis is that Crawford’s drive for stardom “was about finding and receiving the attention and love she had always hungered for and never had.” That reads like an M-G-M logline. For Crawford, the business of stardom, the art of performance, and the craving for self-transformation were inseparable. This art didn’t come naturally; it took years of on-the-job self-cultivation and is inextricable from the story of the formation and development of the real-life fiction that is Crawford. That’s how she became the most profoundly movie-made actor of all movie stars. For instance, her exertions extended to publicity photos; she often spent a whole day changing costumes, hairdos, and makeup for the photographer George Hurrell, who said that “she used this opportunity to try to present a new image that might possibly work for her whole screen personality.”

With her relentless quest for visual self-awareness, Crawford became an expert in cinematography. The actor Raymond Massey, one of her co-stars in “Possessed” (1947) said, “She was the best technician I ever met. Could match close-ups and long shots flawlessly. Knew everything about lighting, camera lenses, and dressed for the camera, and not the other actors.” The director Vincent Sherman, who made three movies with her in the nineteen-fifties, concurred. “She was a collaborator in working to achieve a total effect. She was the kind of person that you could talk to about the way you wanted to shoot the thing, the background, the cutting. She was conscious of everything that went on set,” he said. Crawford was obsessed with controlling her filmic appearance, recalling, “I religiously looked at my dailies every night. And I studied myself.”

Crawford worked hard at acting, too—at conveying emotion, which she did in a distinctively modern way, by actually feeling it. Never having done anything onstage but dance, she didn’t understand the art of pretending. Fairbanks again: “She could not believe that Lynn Fontanne might feel physically dreadful yet be able to perform high comedy with supreme and subtle wit. Nor could she believe that a great actress like Helen Hayes could consciously reduce audiences to uncontrollable tears while she thought about having a juicy steak sandwich after the performance.” The result was both straightforward and complex. Her speech, lacking theatrical craft, is direct, stark, and unmannered, and the finely honed artifice of her physical bearing is the basis for the immediacy and spontaneity of the emotions she unleashes. In effect, Crawford stumbled on a Method of her own making, later explaining, “I remember every one of my important roles the way I remember a part of my life, because at the time I did them, I was the role and it was my life for 14 hours a day.”

Eyman emphasizes that M-G-M was the most star-centric of all studios—and also the most top-down, executive-managed one. Directors there were under tight control, and Crawford had little regard for most of them, though she did hold one in particular esteem: George Cukor, with whom she made three films—most notably, “The Women” (1939), in which she had an indelibly vicious supporting role as a department-store sales clerk who seduces a rich married man. In that prime studio era, actors, directors, screenwriters, and even composers of scores were under long-term contract (generally, seven years), and technicians (such as cinematographers, set designers, and hairdressers) were permanent, salaried employees; as a result, each studio’s style, set from above, was baked into its movies. Crawford’s early starring roles tended toward tough women, whether laborers or dancers or playgirls, whose sexual allure is a source of power. Still, M-G-M’s notion of raciness was tamer than in other studios—and once the bowdlerizing Hays Code was put into full effect, in the mid-thirties, the studio shifted, as Eyman says, to “middle-class domestic fantasy,” which meshed poorly with Crawford’s image and her personality. Even her better films at the studio (such as Dorothy Arzner’s “The Bride Wore Red,” a trio of films directed by Frank Borzage that includes “Mannequin,” and her last one with Cukor, “A Woman’s Face,” from which Eyman’s book gets its title) were cramped by sentimentality. Her popularity declined; many in the business thought her career was over.

Crawford said that, in the postwar years, “the fun aspects went out of American movie-making.” And yet it was her films of this era that would prove most lasting. Postwar changes in the industry included the rise of a new and daring generation of directors and the unleashing of a new and freer range of emotions (despite the persistence of the Hays Code) resulting from the traumas of war. One of Crawford’s greatest roles came in 1947, in a furious postwar-themed drama, “Daisy Kenyon,” directed by Otto Preminger, in which she starred as a fashion illustrator torn between romance with a married and hard-edged corporate lawyer (Dana Andrews) and a widowed naval architect who’s also a traumatized veteran (Henry Fonda). The business changed even more with the antitrust consent decree of 1948, which, in effect, broke up the studios, forcing them to divest themselves of movie theatres (thus drying up a virtually guaranteed cash flow) just as they faced the new challenge of television, which started cutting deeply into the box-office. In the resulting economic crisis, Crawford, like many other actors, was taken off contract—at the end of 1951, Warner Bros. let her go, and she became a freelancer.

Circumstances again aligned to Crawford’s advantage, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. Just as her breakup with M-G-M led to better opportunities at Warner Bros., the turn to freelance work, despite increased uncertainty, gave Crawford more power and more control than she’d ever had under contract. In the mid-fifties, she starred in two movies made by two of the most explosively expressive, even expressionistic, directors of the time: Nicholas Ray’s Western “Johnny Guitar” (1954) and Robert Aldrich’s romantic melodrama “Autumn Leaves” (1956). These, along with the Preminger film, are Crawford’s supreme masterworks. Ray’s film was based on a novel by a screenwriter who had dedicated it to her; she bought the rights to it, and the deal was packaged by her and Ray’s agent, Lew Wasserman, of MCA. While at M-G-M, Crawford had been considered a consummate professional who “never stormed off a set,” her former M-G-M producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz said, and “was never a pampered star.” But, in her freelance era, Crawford knew that she held the high hand and played it with a vengeance. 

Eyman misconstrues this part of Crawford’s career:

On the contrary, Crawford had reached the apotheosis of her style. But she had the misfortune of doing so at a time and in an industry, run entirely by men, where a woman of fifty was considered over the hill and no longer a romantic leading lady. She discovered the most radical form of her self-presentation in a cinematic era that was ill-equipped to deploy it. She was both a creation and a victim of Hollywood. In her youth, the period that studios considered an actress’s prime, she had been in a gilded cage, slotted into star vehicles over which she had little control. Now, when the industry was in a commercial crisis and when she was bearing the brunt of its ingrained ageism and sexism, she was finally in control. She was free and hating it.

If the young Lucille or Billie’s origin story would have been too extreme for the Hollywood of the time, much the same is true of her love life once she’d arrived as a star, and Hollywood publicists stayed busy keeping the details out of the papers, just as screenwriters stayed busy keeping such subjects out of the movies. By the mid-forties, Crawford had been married three times: to Fairbanks; to another star, Franchot Tone; and to a bit player named Phillip Terry. In addition, as Eyman discusses, there were many affairs—including with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Glenn Ford, Vincent Sherman, Robert Wagner, and the lawyer Greg Bautzer. In 1938, she had an affair with the seventeen-year-old Jackie Cooper, who later recalled her as “a very erudite professor of love . . . a wild woman. . . . I recognized that she was an extraordinary performer, that I was learning things that most men don’t learn until they are much older—if at all.” 

Sherman, who had directed both Crawford and Davis and had romantic relationships with them both, saw their differences schematically: “In life and offscreen, Bette was simple, forthright, honest and unaffected. The moment she began playing a role she became actorish and theatrical. Joan, on the other hand, was simple, forthright, honest and unaffected when playing a role, but in life she was exactly the opposite: actorish, theatrical and affected.” Their biggest conflict appears to have been artistic: Davis wanted to rehearse with full expression, Crawford wanted merely to run through the lines. “I never give until the camera’s turned,” she said. “You know, how much can you give of yourself? Why give it anyway, for God’s sakes, it’s not being recorded.” The difference in their performances is exactly as Sherman says: Davis’s elaborately mannered performance is especially effective in this film because its theatricality renders it, as befits the role, a self-parody. Crawford’s performance, less showy but much deeper, draws viewers into emotion to the extent that the Grand Guignol script allows. Davis is in a sensationalistic horror movie; Crawford is in a far more substantial melodrama, and their two parallel movies are connected only by Aldrich’s directorial flamboyance.

The other unfortunate pillar of Crawford’s legacy comes not from anything that she did onscreen but from her reputation as a monstrous mother, as she was described in her daughter Christina’s memoir “Mommie Dearest”—which appeared in 1978, the year after Crawford’s death—and then portrayed in Faye Dunaway’s furious incarnation of her in the film adaptation of the book, from 1981. Eyman gives Christina’s account little credence, but the eyewitness accounts that he mentions suggest that Crawford’s actions toward her children were beyond the pale of constructive parenting. A visitor to Crawford’s home, when Christopher was about four or five, found him tied to his bed by all four limbs. Crawford explained that his hands were tied “because he sucks his thumb,” and his legs “because he kicks off the covers.” After Crawford brought Christina and Christopher to visit Shirley Temple, the child star recalled, “Each child performed like a programmed wind-up toy.”

 “It was as if Crawford had never seen the way an actual, semi-normal family interacts,” Eyman writes. “In fact, she hadn’t.” Eventually, Crawford conceded as much:

In her performances, Crawford both revealed and burst the limits of Hollywood. She may have worked harder at Hollywood fame and success than other stars of her magnitude, and she worked strenuously on her acting—but, above all, she developed a craft that was entirely of her own making. She has the sublimity of thoroughly assumed and assimilated artifice, which is inseparable from her self-reinvention through the eye of the camera. That’s why the red-hot tension of her acting doesn’t seem effortful and comes off as natural and candid; the tension is her very own.