Vanity Fair Online: March 17, 2017

The Heartwarming Joan Crawford Friendship Behind Ryan Murphy’s Feud

Murphy paid tribute to Crawford and William Haines, her friend and interior designer, by painstakingly re-creating the movie star’s home decor.

By Julie Miller   Online Article

William Haines and Joan Crawford in Spring Fever.

Before tuning into Ryan Murphy’s latest anthology series Feud, many audience members likely had preconceptions about the over-the-top Old Hollywood stars at its center: Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon)—particularly Crawford, who was villainized in her daughter’s notorious tell-all, Mommie Dearest. But with Feud, which airs its third episode on FX this Sunday, Murphy hopes to do more than reframe this famous Hollywood rivalry—he wants to soften Crawford’s image while he’s at it.

“Joan Crawford has gotten a really bad rap through the years, because of that Mommie Dearest film, which froze her as this wire hangers, monstrous archetype,” Murphy explained by phone on Wednesday. “I’m not going to try and dispute Christina Crawford or her book, because that’s her personal recollection. But Joan Crawford was more than what her daughter wrote. She was also a really good person and a really good friend.”

Case in point: Crawford’s fierce loyalty to actor Williams Haines (Little Annie Rooney, Show People), even after his movie career fizzled because he refused to hide his homosexuality—or his boyfriend Jimmie Shields—from the public, unlike other gay movie stars of the era. Crawford did not only stand by him, though. She also enlisted him and Shields to give her Los Angeles home an overhaul—and helped launch his career as Hollywood’s go-to interior designer.

“The studio chief told Billy, ‘You can choose your career or you can choose your boyfriend,’ ” Murphy explained. “Billy chose his boyfriend. I love that even back in the 1920s, there was a gay man who was ballsy enough to say, ‘Fuck you. I’m not ashamed of who I am. If you want to fire me for who I am, I’m going to reinvent myself and still be successful.”

In fact, Haines went on to become a far more successful interior designer than he ever was as a movie star—counting Gloria Swanson, Carole Lombard, Marion Davies, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan as his clients. (Murphy has collected between 20 and 25 pieces—his favorites being the Billy Haines lamps, which sit in his Laguna Beach home.) And Haines and Shields—whom Crawford called “the happiest married couple in Hollywood”—remained a devoted couple for four and a half decades, until Haines’s death.

“I love his spirit and Joan’s story,” Murphy continued. “What she did for Billy Haines took a lot of gumption and a lot of balls back then. That showed true character and true loyalty . . . There were a lot of wonderful qualities of her as a person, as a star, that have been swept under the rug. We had a real opportunity, with Feud, to recast that legacy and that vision.”

Joan Crawford in the sitting room of her Brentwood home, designed by interior decorator William Haines.

Although Haines has not appeared as a flesh-and-blood character on Feud, it was important for Murphy to pay homage to Crawford and Haines’s relationship by painstakingly re-creating Crawford’s immaculate home. To do so, he enlisted Oscar-nominated production designer Judy Becker (American Hustle, Carol) and set to work rebuilding Haines’s legacy on the show’s Culver City studio lot.

“Their friendship is important to me, so I really wanted to show that off—and be particular and loyal to their special friendship and that collaboration,” said Murphy. “Then Judy and I had a collaboration, so it felt very full circle to me.”

Ahead, the delicious details of re-creating Crawford’s estate.

Where to Begin

“When we could, we tried to be slavishly loyal to what Billy Haines and she had concocted,” said Murphy. “They were all about the scale. Billy Haines loved negative space. He loved things floating in rooms. He was a true modernist, and brought a lot of that modern verve and vivid color to California decorating in that movie star period.”

Rather than re-create the Brentwood mansion associated with Crawford’s Mommie Dearest days, Murphy and Becker pored over archival photographs of Crawford’s homes over the years—hand-picking the details they liked best.

(One example of their interior-design license: the artificial cherry tree in Crawford’s living room, which Crawford used as a design flourish in the grand Manhattan apartment she and her husband, Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele, shared in the 1950s.)

“We used some elements from the apartment she lived in in New York, and from another apartment she lived in temporarily in Los Angeles, and from her homes,” said Becker. “But did it in such a way that I think it works as a cohesive whole, expressing all these different decor aspects of Joan Crawford.

“Billy convinced her to renovate her house from this kind of 1920s Spanish mansion to the Hollywood regency mansion that it became,” explained Becker by phone. “And he was really a huge influence on terms of taste and fashion. Not just decor but that whole self-presentation aspect of herself.”

Judy Davis as Hedda Hopper and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford in Feud.

“Joan Crawford was also very obsessed with the color blue in her homes—blue mixed with cream,” said Murphy. (Indeed, in Crawford’s memoir, she explained that Haines even nicknamed the signature blue covering her living-room walls “Crawford blue.”) “I think the combination denotes cleanliness and order.” (In contrast, Bette Davis’s cozy East Coast-style home—full of comfy couches, hearths, and dark woods—is swathed in warm browns.)

Closet

“Joan Crawford's bathrooms and her organizational skills were insanely great,” said Murphy. “If you listen to her book My Way of Life, she dedicates chapters to organizing her clothes by season—and color coding clothes, gloves, hats, underwear, and shoes. She was a matchy-matchy person, and fanatical about control and order. On the surface, that just seems like a weird character trait, but actually, I was very moved by it.

“Joan Crawford was an abused child—sexually and physically,” explained Murphy. “She was sent off to a boarding home, I think, when she was 11. She put her way through that school by scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets. I think what she took from that was that cleaning created a sense of order and calm. She couldn’t control her past. She couldn’t control who had abused her, but goddamn it, she could control her glove drawer.”

Bathroom

“The bathroom was a tribute to the old movie-star bathrooms of yore,” said Murphy. “We didn’t have a lot of pictures to go on for her bedroom and bathroom area. What I did know is that she had a mini-refrigerator made for her bathroom, which, at the time, was unheard of, in which she kept her witch hazel and her vodka and her ice cubes. Every woman needs one.

“Judy and I looked at all of the things we knew about Joan, and we created this movie queen station,” Murphy said of Joan’s vanity. “We wanted to always compare and contrast Joan with Bette. If you look at Joan’s vanity, it’s literally a built-in wall with lots of lighted bulbs. Then if you look at Bette’s, she could give a fuck. It was just basically a vanity with a chair that she had thrown up against the wall. Bette Davis didn’t have a movie star bathroom. She had a bathroom with a toilet and sink and a shower.”

Judy Davis as Hedda Hopper and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford in Feud.

Bedroom

“When you’re working on a show or a movie that’s based on reality, you have to tweak things, often in unexpected ways,” explained Becker. “Joan’s actual bedroom was very nice and very glamorous for the era, but it was a little less-impressive looking in real life. My experience has often been that reality can look too barren, especially in any decade before the 1980s.

“So to express how glamorous it was for the time, in a show for contemporary audiences, we upped the glamour factor a little bit,” said Becker. “It’s a really fine balance being true to what things looked like at that time and making it feel real to the viewer.”

Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and Alison Wright as Pauline Jameson in Feud.

Those Plastic Slipcovers, Though

“Tragically in the late 50s and early 60s came this trend of putting plastic on everything,” said Murphy. “I think Billy Haines probably was aghast that Joan Crawford did that . . . She even had a plastic cover on her bed, which I thought was amazing.

“But you know who else had plastic on their couch?” said Murphy, laughing. “My grandmother. I remember asking her, ‘Why do we have plastic on your couch? It’s so awful.’ She said, ‘It keeps the furniture nice. It preserves it.’ ”

“This idea of Joan Crawford trying to preserve everything—her legend, this beauty, this stardom that had passed her by, even her furniture— in a weird away, became a character trait. Jessica [Lange] loved it, because it helped her get in the mindset of Crawford, who was very aware of the encroaching effects of time and wear.”

Helping Jessica Find Joan

“Jessica and I talked a lot about playing Joan Crawford, which was very difficult because everything about Joan Crawford was a re-creation,” explained Murphy. “She reinvented everything. She was a child of poverty and abuse who became a scrappy club dancer in the 20s. Then she became a movie star. Then she became Hollywood royalty. I think she wanted to be somebody so desperately that she created that persona . . . then got confused as to where the real Lucille LeSueur”—Crawford’s real name—“ended and where Joan Crawford began.

“Jessica and I decided that everything, for Joan, was a performance,” said Murphy. “She would do a full face and hair, put on gloves, a suit, and high heels to walk down to the mail box. Every moment was an art, a controlled opportunity. It was all artifice, which is what Hollywood is anyway. In many ways, I think she was the first true creature of Hollywood in that sense.

“She, I think, only let that guard down when she was drunk or alone, and Jessica and I really played with that,” said Murphy. “The Texas twang would come out when she would drink. The mid-Atlantic movie star MGM bullshit accent would go away. There was great pain in [her transformation], but also I really admire it and relate to it. I was also an impoverished kid from Indiana who moved out here with 37 or 50 bucks in my pocket, and re-created myself.

“I understood that impulse to see something down the road and say, ‘Oh, I want to be that,’ and then move toward that dream. For Lucille, becoming Joan Crawford was a great fantasy that came true to her—down to the upholstered furniture in her living room.”