One image looms large in the pop culture firmament when it comes to Joan Crawford, of a hellbent neurotic who clung to fame with every fiber of her being and kept her cowering children on as tight a leash as her husbands, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Franchot Tone, Phillip Terry and Pepsi-Cola executive Alfred Steele. Hollywood and history have not been kind to women who struggled within the confines of their industry, especially women who continued to work beyond the age of ingenue.

Donald Spoto aims to rectify that unfortunate caricature and posthumously grab back Crawford's dignity on behalf of the misunderstood star in his biography Possessed (William Morrow, $25.99), a revisionist portrait of one of the Classical Hollywood Cinema's most misunderstood stars. Spoto's portrait instead provides an image of a determined, hardscrabble survivor who overcame extraordinary hardships, including an impoverished childhood and a pitifully limited education. Crawford sailed beyond those limitations with typical gusto, taking both her career and personal self-improvement very seriously, some would even say humorlessly. Through her friendships with Constance Bennett, Rosalind Russell and Gloria Swanson, Crawford learned the subtle art of glamour. And through her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (who called her Billie) Crawford learned the social skills and decorum that would also allow her to progress in life, to move from the ranks of a Jazz Baby hoofer to one of Hollywood's most bankable grown-up stars.

"People did not know that Billie was really a terribly vulnerable person, all during her life. A lot of her so-called toughness was part of the pose, part of being 'Joan Crawford,'" noted Fairbanks, Jr. Always attuned to the wisdom of her elders (especially substitute daddy figures including M-G-M head Louis B. Mayer, who symbolically replaced her own AWOL father), Crawford constantly trolled for career and life direction and found it in one piece of advice gleaned from Douglas Fairbanks Sr. on the transition from silent film to sound film. "Feelings are for silent pictures--thoughts are for the talkies," he said, a lesson she certainly took to heart as her career progressed from silent era onscreen party girl into melodramas and love stories that often imagined Crawford as the prize vied over by two competing lovers.

Crawford proved one of the resilient and resourceful stars able to weather the transition from silent pantomime to the subdued and shaded performances in sound films and in the process learned the film industry from top to bottom, says Spoto. She would occasionally even step in to offer dialogue and scriptwriting advice when a writer was stymied, as in her 1930 starring role in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). Crawford's ability to do comedy, drama, dancing and singing in films like Dance, Fools, Dance made her an important asset and finally, enormous money-maker for M-G-M in films like Possessed (1931), The Women (1939) and A Woman's Face (1941).

Spoto's is a deeply sympathetic portrait of a misunderstood woman that doesn't overlook Crawford's controlling approach to child-rearing (though he can't miss several opportunities to swipe at turncoat daughter Christina) or her ability to mar a film set when her dislike of a fellow performer interfered with her usual professionalism, certainly the case when Crawford and Norma Shearer crossed swords during the making of The Women. Spoto also details Crawford's tempestuous romantic life with a succession of lovers and husbands, some of whom provided a comforting mirror image of her own background and experiences, like Clark Gable--her co-star in Possessed, Dancing Lady (1933), Chained (1934), Forsaking All Others (1934), Love on the Run (1946) and Strange Cargo (1940). Or others like Franchot Tone, whose regal bearing and background allowed Crawford to grow and refine elements of her personality. Though ultimately Crawford admitted of her constant social anxiety and fear of not measuring up established in her childhood, "I was always an outsider."

The author of two dozen film biographies on subjects from Alfred Hitchcock to Alan Bates, Spoto also doesn't hold back the tides of dish when necessary, including the anecdote commemorated in the campy 1981 Frank Perry film based on daughter Christina Crawford's tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest, in which a 62-year-old Joan steps in to replace her 29-year-old daughter Christina, after she falls ill, on the set of the CBS soap The Secret Storm, and proceeded to drunkenly recite her daughter's lines. His inventory, for instance, of Crawford's demands as she did publicity tours for Strait-Jacket (1964) and her late husband Alfred Steele's beloved Pepsi Cola company are hilarious catalogues of the lofty heights of celebrity ego including the notice that lackeys in future cities be aware "Miss Crawford will be carrying a minimum of 15 pieces of luggage." Some of the essentials Crawford required: one carton of King Sano cigarettes, one bowl of peppermint Life Savers, two fifths of 100-proof Smirnoff vodka, one fifth Old Forester bourbon..." just two items in a long and boozy catalogue. In the waning days of her film career, Crawford's demands increased, but so too did her personal demons including a gnawing loneliness attested to by her co-star Judy Geeson and producer Herman Cohen on Beserk (1967). Crawford was often tormented by the gruesome turn her later career took with roles in Robert Aldrich's films such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), which a respiratory illness forced her to abandon or in absurdist, B-grade productions like director William Castle's I Saw What You Did (1965) and in Trog (1970) and Beserk.

Spoto's is a fascinating portrait of an equally fascinating and conflicted, talented, sexually adventurous, bold woman who treated her crew members with memorable kindness and consideration, but is remembered for every emotional misstep and some admittedly hyperbolic roles. Those over the top performances were especially true in her later years, but were also sprinkled throughout her career, such as in Nicholas Ray's cult Western Johnny Guitar (1954), in which she engaged in spats with a drunken Mercedes McCambridge.

Who knows where the truth of a person's life lies? But Spoto's biography resurrects a vision of Crawford as a great friend and coworker (her The Ice Follies of 1939), 1939 co-star Jimmy Stewart and Mildred Pierce, 1945 co-star Ann Blyth among others, attest to those qualities), resourceful, dedicated, charitable, generous and a tireless workhorse that goes a long way to restoring a cultural impression of a woman who has been punished with time's passage, for her refusal to conform to an image of woman as soft and compliant. "She demanded that we rethink what it means to be female," says Spoto. The book's title takes on a double-entendre then, that defined Crawford, of a woman who some saw as frenzied and career-obsessed but who was equally a woman who took unique control of her fate and soldiered on against all odds.

by Felicia Feaster