The “unintentional comedy” that destroyed Faye Dunaway’s career in 1981
The wild ways of Hollywood were certainly no revelation to Faye Dunaway.
After rising through the ranks of Broadway in the 1960s, her major breakthrough arose with Chinatown, a production so fraught that it reportedly found her swilling Roman Polanski with a glass of her own urine after the director refused to let her take a break amid endless re-takes of a tricky scene.
Meanwhile, Polanski grew so enraged with Jack Nicholson for refusing to budge from his trailer until the LA Lakers game had finished that he attempted to storm in and smash his TV to bits. Ironically, all of this put Dunaway in good stead for the role of Joan Crawford in the 1981 movie Mommie Dearest. But no matter how well-versed she was in chaos and lapsed self-control, the movie still brutally destroyed her career.
Based on an explosive bestseller by Crawford’s daughter, Christina, the movie depicted Joan – a Golden Age Hollywood star who shot to fame through features like Our Dancing Daughters in 1928 – as an erratic and cruel figure, warped by fame and fortune. It was simultaneously shocking and unsurprising.
There had never been any doubt that Crawford was certainly forthright and driven. As MGM screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas mused, “No one decided to make Joan Crawford a star. Joan Crawford became a star because Joan Crawford decided to become a star.” This attitude established the Texan-born thespian as perhaps the world’s first true ‘it girl’.
Even F Scott Fitzgerald was finding ink to spill on her, writing, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.”
But as Christina would claim, the great highs she experienced were fuel for cruel and capricious comedowns. A mention in her will just about sums that up: “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.” It was startling from afar, but Christina didn’t much care.
Her life had been blighted by scenes such as her mother chopping down a beloved orange tree in the garden in a fit of rage. On another occasion, she was berated in her infancy as being “thoughtless and selfish” for interrupting her mother while she was getting ready.
Ostensibly, Dunaway seemed perfect for the part. By this stage, she had already been called a “diva” by former directors, and Leslie Jordan said she was “batshit crazy”. She wouldn’t have to ‘go method’ for the role. Joan Crawford herself had even inadvertently picked her out as a star, writing in 1971, “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.”
But they may well have been too similar for it ever to work. The costume designer on the movie, Irene Sharaff, would comment on how asking someone of a fragile disposition to embody somebody of a similar ilk was always set to be carnage. “Yes, you may enter Miss Dunaway’s dressing room,” Sharaff once said, “but first, you must throw a raw steak in – to divert her attention.”
In the end, the shooting of Mommie Dearest was so horrific that nobody really cared all that much about how it came across. In the end, the mania was allowed to unfurl, and the movie was ultimately marketed as an “unintentional comedy”. For someone as serious about their trade as Dunaway, that proved disastrous. It was clear that she was gunning for an Oscar, meanwhile, everyone else was grinning behind her back.
In 2016, Dunaway admitted that the role “turned my career in a direction where people would irretrievably have the wrong impression of me.” It was as though the on-screen portrayal confirmed all the rumours of her haywire ways swirling around Hollywood. The narrative now had visual proof, despite the fact that it was for a movie, and the tide turned against her.
As Dunaway added, “That’s an awful hard thing to beat. I should have known better, but sometimes you’re vulnerable, and you don’t realise what you’re getting into.” One major part of the problem was that she also allowed it to stew. Rather than attempting to laugh it off and revert people’s attention to the esteem she had built up throughout the 1970s, she ignored the odious flop, and it festered.
The stories of her antics began to override her successes, and producers grew wary of ever hiring her. In her memoir, she reflects that the phone barely rang after Mommie Dearest, and like the orange tree that inspired it, her career was felled in its prime in a rather manic fashion.
