What's in a Name: Joan Crawford
Today, you can’t think about Old Hollywood without thinking
of her place in the firmament of stars, but once upon a time her name was
Lucille LeSueur and it took a publicity contest to give her the name we remember
her by: Joan Crawford.
Joan Crawford has a real ‘pulled up by her bootstraps’ story.
She’s so mysterious, we don’t even definitively know her
birth year. You have to respect the hustle that came with never truly revealing
perhaps the most vital statistic about yourself. Wouldn’t I love to be that
sort of mysterious; my relatives filling out my death certificate and their
jaws dropping in shock when they find out I was born in 1987!
But back to Joan. She was born Lucille Fay LeSueur on March
23 in whatever year—dealer’s choice between 1904, 1905, 1907 and 1908, they all
popped up throughout her lifetime—as the daughter of young, poor parents.
Her father abandoned the family before she was a year old
and her mother remarried a man named Henry Cassin. Personal and legal troubles
plagued the family throughout their lives. Even when she was a big star, they
would drag her into their problems, to say nothing of the shenanigans that
happened in her early years.
She couldn’t afford proper schooling, so her mother enrolled
her at St. Agnes Academy in Kansas City as a working student—which meant she did
more chores and upkeep for her fellow Richie Rich classmates than actual studying—and
she was never a stellar pupil. When she switched schools and enrolled at
Rockingham Academy, it was the same situation. She did a short stint at
university but withdrew because of her poor academics.
Lucille’s dreams of being a dancer never left her, and she
soon began dancing in revues, eventually making her way to New York City in the
early 1920s. By 1924, she found herself at MGM for a screen test. On Christmas
Eve that year, she was signed to a $75/week contract.
Now comes the fun part.
MGM’s main publicity man, Pete Smith, did not like Lucille’s
name and felt it was actively impeding her ability to become the kind of big
star he knew she could be. It sounded too much like ‘Lucille Le Sewer’ to him,
and he told Louis B. Mayer that he’d arranged a contest with Movie Weekly,
one of the fan magazines, to let the public choose her name.
And so, in the March 27, 1925 issue, the ‘Name the Star’ contest launched in Movie Weekly. If you successfully chose Lucille’s new name, you’d win $500. If your name was among the top ten finalists, you’d win $50.
Lucille gave an interview to the presciently-named Joan Cross
and said that “People never have been able to pronounce my name or spell it,”
and that she, as one of the judges on the committee, would favour a name that
was easy to say and spell, and one that was memorable. “…when the readers of
Movie Weekly have decided upon a screen name for me, my happiness will be
complete.”
Cross wrote of the soon-to-be starlet: “She is an
auburn-haired, blue-eyed beauty and is of French and Irish descent. Second only
to her career is her interest in athletics, and she devotes much of her spare
time to swimming and tennis.”
Readers could submit as many entries as they wanted over a
six-week period, and the judging panel included Lucille, Harry Rapf (the MGM producer
who discovered and signed Lucille), Adele Whitely Fletcher (editor of Movie
Weekly), Edwin Schallert (an editor at the Los Angeles Times), and Florence
Lawrence (awesomely-named woman and an editor at the Los Angeles Examiner).
- A short or moderate length name
- A lasting name, since Lucille wouldn’t be able to change it again
- It needed to be “euphonious, pleasing and yet have strength”
- A memorable and impressive name
- It couldn’t imitate or evoke another starlet’s name (more about this later)
As the contest continued, Movie Weekly shared
updates, saying that “A beautiful young screen actress, whose first
appearance may possibly create a sensation among picture-goers, is asking your
help in selecting a suitable screen name.”
Though the contest was meant to last six weeks, it took
until the September 1925 issue—six months later—for Lucille’s new name to be
announced. Some updates noted that thousands of entries had been submitted but
that none of the names had the panache the judges were looking for.
Finally, in September 1925, Lucille’s new name was announced:
Joan Crawford. But it wasn’t a straightforward route to this name. Joan Arden
was the winning name, but MGM ‘discovered’ that they had another starlet on the
payroll with that name, and the runner-up of Joan Crawford was chosen.
That’s the official story, anyways. Rumours have circulated
for decades that too many entries chose that name and MGM didn’t want to pay
out multiple prize moneys, so they went with Joan Crawford instead.
And Mrs. Marie M. Tisdale, an elderly woman from Albany, New
York, became $500 richer. Adjusted to 2023 dollars, that’s a prize of $8,977.37.
She reportedly used the prize money to pay her hospital bills.
Joan Crawford was born! And Lucille hated her new
name. She wanted to make ‘Jo-anne’ the official pronunciation but it never took
off, and she disliked that ‘Crawford’ sounded too much like ‘Crawfish.’ She had
a childhood nickname, Billie, and asked her friends to call her that instead of
Joan.
At any rate, MGM was right about Joan: she soon became one
of their biggest stars, embodying the flapper lifestyle and drawing in
audiences for her silent picture turns. A few of her films were even
re-released with her new name on the credits, that’s how popular she became.
Joan was a queen of self-promotion (you have to think that
she’d crush it at social media if she was starting out today),
photographed and filmed at dance halls and hotels doing the latest dance crazes.
It helped boost her profile with the public, and in 1926,
she was named a WAMPAS Baby Star, a yearly publicity campaign where the Western
Association of Motion Picture Advertisers would choose a group of young
starlets on the verge of stardom and crown them as the up-and-coming stars of
tomorrow.
Joan successfully made the transition to sound and became one
of Hollywood’s biggest stars. She bounced back from being labelled ‘Box Office
Poison’, worked at the biggest studios: MGM, then Warner Brothers, then MGM
again, and won an Oscar in 1945 for Mildred Pierce.
In her later career, she became a ‘scream queen’, a board
member of Pepsi-Cola, a television star, and the legacy-defining ‘Mommie
Dearest’ from her eldest daughter’s autobiography, published after Joan’s death
in 1977.
For whatever she thought of her name, you can’t argue that Joan Crawford didn’t take it and milk every last drop from it throughout her long career.
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