Original photo by Allstar Picture Library Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
Like many classic Hollywood stars, Joan Crawford was known by a stage name rather than her real name. Born Lucille Fay LeSueur, the future Oscar winner made her silver-screen debut in 1925’s Lady of the Night under her birth name. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had signed her to a $75-a-week contract, saw potential in the starlet but feared her name would be a hindrance; Pete Smith, the head of publicity at MGM, thought her surname sounded too much like the word “sewer.”
So the upper brass at MGM landed on a novel solution: a contest run in the fan magazine Movie Weekly, which offered between $50 and $500 for coming up with a new name for “a beautiful young screen actress.” The perfect name, according to MGM, “must be moderately short and euphonious. It must not imitate the name of some already established artiste. It must be easy to spell, pronounce, and remember. It must be impressive and suitable to the bearer’s type.”
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThough biographers know her birthday was March 23, the year has been listed as 1904, 1905, 1906, and 1908 by various sources.
The winner, as fate would have it, wasn’t Joan Crawford; it was Joan Arden, which was already the name of an extra who threatened to sue MGM. And so the second-place winner was chosen instead, not that the new Joan Crawford was happy about it — she initially hated the name before making the most of it.
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Crawford’s fourth husband was chairman of the board at ______.
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Crawford’s fourth husband was chairman of the board at Pepsi-Cola.
Crawford accepted her Oscar from bed.
After a string of hits in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Crawford’s luck so reversed itself that she was deemed “box-office poison” in TIME magazine by the end of the decade. Her comeback wasn’t fully solidified until she took the title role in 1945’s Mildred Pierce, which resulted in her sole Academy Award — not that she was expecting to win.
Believing Ingrid Bergman would take home the Oscar for The Bells of St. Mary’s, Crawford was disinclined to attend any ceremony where she wouldn’t be victorious and opted to feign illness. Upon learning she’d won, however, she put on her makeup, invited members of the press to her bedroom, and accepted the statuette from the comfort of her own bed.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
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