Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Chained, 1934
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By the mid-1930s, Joan Crawford was very, very famous, and negotiating both an affair to Clark Gable (her most frequent co-star and the only male star of her stature) and a new marriage to Franchot Tone, who, like Joan’s first husband, was an actor who was not quite on her level of stardom. Crawford’s marriage to Tone would span the back half of the decade, as Crawford’s stardom peaked, and then began its first decline. Today we’ll talk about that, and then we’ll tell a story about what happened to Franchot Tone after Joan Crawford — particularly, the strange love triangle he entered into in the 1950s, with a gorgeous but self-destructive starlet Barbara Payton at its center.
Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone
Show notes:
Every episode this season will draw from the following books about, and/or based on conversations with, Joan Crawford:
Not The Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler
Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography by Lawrence Quirk and William Schoell
Conversations with Joan Crawford by Roy Newquist
Sources specific to this episode:
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story by John O’Dowd
A Woman’s View by Jeanine Basinger
This episode includes clips from the movie The Women (1939)
This episode was edited by Sam Dingman, and produced by Karina Longworth with the assistance of Lindsey D. Schoenholtz. Our logo was designed by Teddy Blanks.