Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/834282
Clockwise from top left: The interior of the dining room with its custom-shaped rug. Jessica Lange at the top of Joan Crawford's dramatic entryway staircase. Ms. Crawford talks with Hedda Hopper (played by Judy Davis) in her living room with a view through to her dining room. The living room showcases the portrait oil painting of herself that Ms. Crawford always arranged to hang in a prominent place, no matter where she lived. She also loved plastic slipcovers. They were found everywhere in the research photographs of Ms. Crawford's houses. Sometimes to show historical reality to contemporary audiences, you have to tweak things a bit. For instance, the glamor in Joan's home is amped up a little bit because any celebrity in that time—and Joan was a huge celebrity—just lived at a smaller scale than people do today. If you put her real bedroom onscreen, it would look sort of small and maybe not so glamorous, so in order to sell how glamorous it really was to people of Joan's era, we enhanced it so that it would give that impression to the audiences of today. She really did have a walk-in closet, but I conceived an elaborate three-part vanity wing, as we called it. It contained her built-in (real) marble bathtub and period mini-fridge for her witch hazel and vodka, her dressing table and tri-fold mirror, and clothing, shoe, and accessory cabinets. I had a lot of fun thinking of obsessive details to incorporate. For example, I was inspired by my step-mother's somewhat paranoid habit of listing the inventory of her linen closet on the inside of the door (she's afraid the housekeeper will steal the towels!), and I had inventory lists created for each of Joan's closets. I don't think the audience ever sees this, or many of the other details, but I firmly believe such thought adds to the production value, even if only as an inspiration. When her New York City apartment was actually built for episode eight, it was the much smaller one that she lived in at the end of her life. William Haines had died by then, and the apartment was decorated by his disciple, Carleton Varney. We very much based the look on the real apartment and