#greer's mothering skills at their finest

[lastavenged]

@gammaragee -> 🫦for Greer

Fireworks weren't her favorite thing in the world; they would have to rank on a list of things she didn't like. It's the sound, not the lights, that bothered her. Sensitive hearing, and maybe she's got an issue with any loud bangs and pops. Trauma which she's dealt with in therapy, but that didn't exactly stop the animal in her from raising hairs.

William's excited about that, and will be unless his own animal in him had it's issues. Holidays were fun, except when non-human instinct took over. She copes just fine with everything, had to if she was gonna be superhero but this wasn't fight to save the world kind of stuff. This was mundane in comparison (cheery bizarre human shit; the tiger in her complained).

Greer likes parties, holidays, festivities, and New Years was one of those big ones. Overstimulation always at a risk (its part of her that was cat folk that complained), but she's all cheer otherwise.

William barely made it to ten o'clock, they had been sitting themselves up on the roof. A little get together with some of her neighbors (the ones who were chill when say someone like Reese the vampire showed up) to watch the sky's activity for fireworks and watch the rest of the city streets go crazy with New Years.

The happiest appearance of the night was Bruce showing up, which she's sure was a surprise to her neighbors. Six foot four cat woman and a little non-assuming man (with a Hulk and other personalities inside) together. The sight of the night for her was the fact that William got sleepy and crashed on Bruce's lap at exactly 10:12 pm.

It has her laughing softly to herself, because her son was so determined that this year he was going to making it to midnight. There's a whisper into Bruce's ear that they can simply watch the ball drop on the TV channel from the couch and William could be put to bed. That is how they ended up cuddled up on the couch, around 11:58 pm, and she's running a finger up-down Bruce's arm.

It's slow movement, as she splits her focus between Bruce and the TV. She really doesn't care about a silly ball drop, but Greer's a girl of traditions. The new year, on the minute, should be ushered in with a kiss and it's been a long time since she's started a new year with someone special. Had any of her relationships made it to a new year or been good enough to last so long? She's really not going to track that.

It's pitiful, but this right here wasn't. Things weren't ever going to be perfect; which isn't what she ever asked for. However, with one minute counting down to the new year, it was perfect. She's proud as her hand draws upward to cup the jaw of her boyfriend as the countdown goes off on the TV; she presses kisses to his cheeks until THREE. TWO.

Her lips press to his, a loud purr in her throat. ❝ Happy New Year, tiger. ❞ Greer's going in for another kiss, pressing together for long before letting out a soft sight after before purring a laugh. ❝ William's gonna be upset he missed it. Let me change the clocks back a few minutes and rewind the tv. You go wake him tell him its almost midnight. A little deception never hurt any kid. ❞ If the fireworks going off, making her pelt stand high, hadn't woken him already.

Greer doesn't let him go quite yet, arms around his neck and she takes up his whole lap. ❝ Gonna hafta kiss me again when the ball drops a second time for Will. ❞

[toloveawarlord]

Ch. 1

Pairing: Lancelot x Greer

Greer is here! She won the most votes on the Ikerev vote!

Tagging my partner in all crime @plumpblueberry

Everything had been rushed.

The proposition.

The negotiations.

The wedding.

Like they could hardly wait to send her away. The weight of restoring their crumbling family honor nearly too much for her thin shoulders to bear. With the union complete, her parents could brag that they now held a claim to the King of Hearts position of the Chosen Thirteen.

Her feelings mattered not. Being the only daughter of the Atlas family, her fate had been sealed with her first cries in infancy, to be passed off as a bride for the family’s glory. Her own purpose.

Greer sat rigid on the edge of the bed in the darkened room. Her chest rose and fell with heavy breaths. The corset anchored her torso upright, pressing her breasts in and plumping them up to display them nearly too much for her own liking in the wedding dress that dipped down into a heart shape. The lacing pulled so tightly that her spine threatened to snap.

Her father requested to speak to her husband, likely to spill honeyed words about how his daughter would be the perfect bride for him. That, at the very least, she could give agreement. Years of training, the whole of her childhood and youthful teenage years spent in lesson after lesson. Education came second in regards to her knowledge. Better to know how to cook and sew, to please her husband, more than to learn about things beyond reading and writing.

Skills. That’s what her mother ingrained into her very core. Her vision of what was appropriate for a wife of a man such as Lancelot Kingsley.

There was once talk of other suitors, back when Greer had barely turned eighteen. To claim a higher status, her parents had investigated all the men of the Chosen Thirteen. The Seven of Hearts, Kyle Ash, had only crossed their discussion once. Her mother did not approve of his drinking habits. Further up the line, The Eight, and the Nine.

Neither struck her parents as suitable, as the kind of suitor they had wished for.

The highest three ranks, held by the esteemed Bright, Clemence, and Kingsley families. King of Hearts had been too unattainable, Lancelot’s father having strict guidelines for marriage. The Clemence’s as well, the head of the family turning them down without so much as introducing Greer to him.

That left the Jack of Hearts, Edgar Bright. An allusive family, drenched in secrets and blood, but the prospect of having a claim to the Jack position too great to ignore. All that had been needed was a formal meeting with Claudius to introduce the idea of marriage.

All their research and investigating into finding leverage to ask for a marriage proposition took nearly a year, and within that year, the former King of Hearts had been pronounced dead. Mourning ensued.

Plotting behind the scenes.

Greer gave a sigh, hands folded tightly in her lap in the darkened room. Lost completely in her thoughts, she did not hear the door open, nor the one she had married call her name the first time.

“Greer,” Lancelot’s voice cut through her divided attention at last. The King of Hearts gazing down at her with an unreadable expression.

Her heart skipped a beat in her chest, guilt washing over her as if the sky had opened up with rain above only her. “My apologies.” Those two words not strangers to her vocabulary, spoken more often than most everything else. How careless to be so absorbed in herself to not notice his entrance. 

A delightful way to begin their consummation. Her mother telling her that it would be less than pleasurable for her, as she’d been made chaste for this very night. It did not matter her feelings. How her heart pounded with fear, how her legs unintentionally squeezed together. Her breath caught in her throat, clawing to breathe.

Yet, what came from his lips struck a different type of fear.

“There is no need for you to apologize. I came to inform you that I’ll be returning to Red Headquarters immediately.”

Without her.

Her golden irises swam with doubt as they searched the blue ones before her. “I’ll accompany you, if you’ll allow it,” Greer said with a shaky breath.

What would her parents say should he leave here without her? How disgraced would she be?

Lancelot regarded her with a frown, not anger but confusion. “Would it not be more comfortable for you to remain here? I’ve much work to attend to.” This luxurious room more suitable for a new bride than the army was.

“I don’t mind waiting,” she answered, rising from her perch on the bed. Her desperation for his agreement evident in her features.

No, she needed to remedy this before things fell apart her first night.

Her mother’s voice echoing in her head drove her feet forward. If he would leave her behind, at least let it be after they had spent some time alone. None could complain if she could honestly say he’d accepted her as his wife fully.

The two had only kissed once, at the alter. A soft and short connection after they were pronounced. Her nervousness in taking a second one from him overshadowed by the reprimand that she would receive if he left without her.

Lancelot cupped her cheek with one hand, the other taking a one of her shaky hands. A bold move but he couldn’t take advantage. “You don’t want this.”

“I do-”

“Greer.” He called her name tenderly, blue irises gazing deeply into hers. “You don’t. Your words do not reflect in your trembling eyes. There’s no need to rush.”

Greer swallowed down the lump in her throat. “Then why?”

Her question could have meant many things.

Why did he refuse his willing wife?

Why did he wish to leave on their wedding night?

Why her at all?

Lancelot brushed his thumb across her cheek, reading all those conflicted emotions burning in her eyes. “Why, indeed.”

No real answer came, but Greer softened at his touch. They lingered there, neither breaking away from the other. Lancelot couldn’t fathom what possessed her to push herself into being intimate with him when they weren’t familiar.

It’s her duty.

Those words. Her father had said them with a smile, clapped him on the shoulder while thanking him for allowing Greer to be his wife.

“If it is your wish to come along, I will not deny it,” Lancelot said after a moment of taking in her behavior. Something bothered him. Her state relaxing at him conceding to bringing her along not quite the reaction expected.

Pressure to produce an heir loomed over him. To silence the Kingsley family and their fight for the next King of Hearts should an ill fate befall Lancelot, he’d taken a wife. More of necessity over want.

The pair had only met once before, after the head of the Atlas family approached him with a proposal for his daughter. One of many. He’d met plenty of women, young girls wishing to become his bride. None had fancied him, high maintenance and self absorbed.

Not Greer. He couldn’t describe her as timid, maybe reserved fit her much better. Behind those golden eyes laid a gentle girl with longing for a place to belong. Her manners and etiquette could pass Jonah’s standards in an instant. She hadn’t talked of fanciful material things or large homes with a grand design.

Instead, she’d guarded her wants. He couldn’t glean what it was the young Atlas desired most. When he’d asked the tired question, she’d given an answer most unusual. What I desire? She’d spoken like that had never occurred to her. 

I don’t know if I have an answer to that question. Her gaze had rose to meet his, the first and only time he’d seen her genuinely smile from her heart.

I want to make someone happy.

Lancelot hadn’t the time to ask her in that moment, hadn’t felt as though it would have been appropriate to pry into her sad words paired with that lovely smile.

Now, as he gazed down at his bride, beautifully gowned in a white dress of the finest material and the most delicate lace, the King caught a glimpse of that smile. Gone as quick as the breeze on the hottest of summer days.

****

A carriage had delivered them to the front of the Red Army Headquarters, soldiers greeting their King with a salute. An announcement had been made only a few days before the wedding about Greer as his choice. A small event, with only a handful of family on either side to witness their union.

Lancelot escorted her to his bedroom. He could have gifted her a room to herself. The thought of her dejected expression crossed his mind and he decided better of saddening her more. “I’ll be in the office, should you need me. There’s no need to wait for my return. You must be exhausted after today’s events.”

She couldn’t ask more of him. That would be rude after begging to be brought along. Instead, she forced a wifely smile and nodded her head. “Thank you.”

The moment the door closed, her legs gave out. Greer placed her hand over her racing heart. The rumors surrounding the King of Hearts were not quite pleasant. He was cold, distant, some even called him a beast.

She’d witnessed herself that he had a demeanor of those standards. Yet, what beast doesn’t take a young maiden when given all the right and opportunity. The kindness in his eyes when he’d read her fears so openly, that could hardly give reason to those rumors.

There on the floor, the newly wed Kingsley stayed in silence. She may not be prepared for the days ahead with her husband. Her desire to understand him had grown immensely, but it couldn’t snuff out the fire of her family’s wishes. Soon, whether she wished it or not, they would be expecting results, news of her successfully carrying his child. 

To secure the Atlas claim on the highest rank of the army.

First chapter complete! Greer and Lancelot have a long way to go and she first has to pass Jonah’s interrogation in the upcoming chapter.

[mrmichaelchadler]

The Feminine Grotesque: On The Warped Legacy of Joan Crawford

This review was originally published on May 4, 2016 and is being republished for Women Writers Week.

“No wire hangers!”

That’s what comes to mind when most people think of Joan Crawford, more so than the professionalism and remarkable performances that mark her four decades long career. 

Shortly after her death in 1977, Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina published “Mommie Dearest,” a memoir detailing her mother’s alleged abusive nature, alcoholism and neuroses. Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, her first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr., her two youngest daughters and others close to her denounced the book. But with Frank Perry’s 1981 film adaptation, featuring Faye Dunaway’s shrieking, hollow, larger-than-life performance, the damage was done. In just 129 minutes the film unravels what Crawford had been building for herself since first gracing the screen in the late 1920s. It turned the image of Crawford in the cultural imagination into a monstress, a soulless camp icon to be mocked and reviled but rarely respected, and a cautionary tale of what happens when women put their careers first.

This misses how layered and beguiling Crawford could be—she’s a woman who embodies all the dreams every young girl has when she looks at the glimmer of Hollywood and thinks “I want to be a star!” and the cold pangs of yearning when the spotlight leaves. The image I hold of Crawford is one crafted from her various roles and interviews that have far more complexity than “Mommie Dearest” and her current legacy do. She’s one of the finest examples of how stardom works and is a powerhouse of an actress, despite the sexism and obstacles she faced from the same industry that made her a starlet. 

Although many stars from classic Hollywood struggled as they aged and the studio system that shaped them went to rot, actresses carried a heavier burden. Towards the end of Marlon Brando’s life he was an absolute embarrassment professionally and personally, but that hasn’t stopped new generations of actors from exalting him, as if screen acting didn’t matter until he showed up.

The 1962 Robert Aldrich film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” reinvigorated Crawford’s career, along with that of Davis, her co-star. It also spawned the dubious “hagsploitation” genre, which is exactly what the word conjures. There is a visceral thrill in watching these aged divas and older cinematic titans hash it out in horror rather than be regulated to playing bloodless, supporting roles far beneath their talents. Films like “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964), starring Davis and Olivia de Havilland (in a role originally meant for Crawford) let these actresses form fascinating roles, and often disregard the rigorous expectations of beauty in order to deconstruct their own images in a metatextual manner. But the films in this genre often look down upon the leading characters rather than empathizing with them. In the last few years of Crawford’s career we see this strain of pure Grand Guignol. In films like 1964’s “Strait-Jacket” and 1970’s “Trog” (her final screen appearance), Crawford is positioned as a punchline.

Crawford took a dim view of her later career after “Baby Jane” saying, “They were all terrible, even the few I thought might be good. I made them because I needed money or because I was bored or both. I hope they have been exhibited and withdrawn and never heard from again.” She stayed in the public eye thanks to her later film work and a prolific television career that included guest spots on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (1967) and “Night Gallery” (1969). Her later career is spotty at best, rarely living up to what she was still capable of as an actress. These failures aren’t enough to undo her many accolades and amazing dramatic performances. They have nothing to do with Crawford as an actress. They are a byproduct of an industry that fails to see the rich interior lives of older women and fails to offer roles worthy of their skills.

It’s ultimately “Mommie Dearest” that cemented Crawford’s legacy as a campy joke. The very end of her career highlights a grotesque femininity that Christina Crawford’s book and Perry’s film expand on.

I’m not interested in parsing out what may or may not be true about Christina’s depiction of her mother. What does interest me are the reasons the legacy was undone by the memoir and its adaptation. The hits Crawford’s image has taken after her death are the result of something that was building up before then: a resentment of professional women. People are more brazen faulting women like Crawford as mothers and romantic partners because they openly put their careers first. In this light, her work in “Mildred Pierce” (1945) gains a deeper meaning as it concerns the price women pay for caring about their careers, the tricky emotional dynamics of the domestic sphere, and a fraught mother/daughter dynamic which predicts issues Crawford would deal with personally later in life.

Joan Crawford was a good, sometimes even great actress but she was also an amazing businesswoman. She may have come through the ranks of the MGM star machine, which changed her birth name from Lucille Fay LeSeur to Joan Crawford and made sure her freckles were never seen on-screen, but she had a hand in crafting her own image.

It should be noted that the stars from this era we remember weren’t really products of the star machine in the first place and were able to retain something essential about themselves even when going through the rigors of Hollywood during their early years. Crawford pivoted from setbacks like the end of her tenure at MGM to signing with Warner Bros. and delivering arguably the best performance of her career in “Mildred Pierce." She had the uncanny skill to adjust her looks to simultaneously reflect and seem slightly ahead of whatever was the conception of the modern woman at the time. Her films particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, which often paired her with Franchot Tone and Clark Gable, showed her as a hard-working young woman on the make, able to find love and success thanks to her own intelligence and sheer will power. Looking at these roles only through Crawford’s biography do her skills as a performer, and understanding of what film actors needed to bring to the table, a disservice. But her hardscrabble, poor upbringing undoubtedly lends these roles an authenticity and edge they wouldn’t have had if played by someone else. Even after having to mount a campaign of self-promotion to get the quality roles she deserved during her early years at MGM, Crawford wasn’t the kind of star to take up issues with the studio. Unlike other actors like James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland, who rightly fought their draconian contracts, Crawford was a professional and knew her limits even as she became one of the most powerful stars in the business during the 1930s. In the “Star Machine,” film historian Jeanine Basinger offers a behind-the-scenes story about “When Ladies Meet” (1941) that illustrates this writing, “Crawford knew her own stardom depended on being professional rather than always getting the key light. She was smart about her career—and cooperative.” Basinger mentions how Crawford mutes her performance when acting against Greer Garson, who was being groomed as a star, while Crawford was already well established and a few years away from leaving MGM. Even as the production team “clearly favors [Garson]” and the politics behind her place at MGM became more fraught, Crawford was always the utmost professional. This anecdote of actresses at very different points in their careers illustrates Crawford’s own professionalism and the short shelf-life of female stars, even those as beloved and well-paid as Crawford. That Crawford was able to last long beyond this moment professionally is a testament to her own acumen.

Crawford was kind to her fans, personally signing the photographs they sent to her; she knew what they wanted from her famous remark, “if you want the girl next door, go next door.” Crawford was self-aware about the beauty politics of her role in the Hollywood ecosystem. Placing her roles through the years next to each other, we can see a startling breadth of presentation. There's the flapper with the witty smile and slick bob that led F. Scott Fitzgerald to say, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.” There’s the lustful, independent dame with looser curls and tighter clothes acting against Clark Gable. Then there’s the career woman of the 1940s moving up in the world on her own, all broad shoulders and long hair. This isn’t to say that Crawford’s only or even primary worth was in her professionalism and understanding of stardom. Her career wouldn’t have spanned that long unless she was able to speak to her audience and be believable as an actress.

While I love the bitchy, sly mistress she plays in “The Women” (1939) and the fluidity of her movement in her flapper roles, Crawford feels at her most transcendent in later roles. 

Crawford’s greatest work shares a few traits particularly in how it highlights how she used posture to indicate character. While Crawford seems like an incredible force of nature, she’s at her most captivating when actually sharing the screen with an actor that can challenge her. There’s of course Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, with each woman bringing a humanity and terror to their roles in dramatically different ways. But there’s also the uncomfortable mother/daughter dynamics that create the backbone of “Mildred Pierce," the garish “Johnny Guitar” that sets her against Sterling Hayden (1954) and one of my favorites, the brief moments she shares with noir staple Gloria Grahame in “Sudden Fear” (1950). Even though Grahame and Crawford barely interact, the film goes to great lengths to position their versions of femininity as dramatic opposites. There’s the lustful, underhanded fatale that Grahame plays on one side and Crawford’s rich, caring playwright on the other, who grows more and more hysterical as the film goes on. If the film was made ten or fifteen years prior, Crawford would likely have been playing Grahame’s role. Crawford shows an incredible understanding on-screen and off of the various compromises women make in trying to find success, romantic and otherwise.

One of her most emotionally realized performances came later in her career in the 1956 drama “Autumn Leaves,” directed by Robert Aldrich. The film delves into mental illness and an older woman/younger man relationship dynamic. But my favorite scenes involve Crawford grappling with her own loneliness, like when she goes to a musical performance early in the film and the world seems to fade around her. The light stays on her face, her shoulders slump and she softens as she gets lost in her memories. These moments show a level of tenderness and self-reflection that contradict the wild-eyed monster Faye Dunaway played her as and her own daughter believed her to be. It may prove impossible to fully wrestle Crawford from this image or shift her legacy so that it portrays the full range of her skill and complications.

It’s hard for me to choose my favorite photograph of Joan Crawford. In a career spanning four decades, Crawford provided audiences with many indelible images of womanhood even if history only holds onto one. But if pressed I would pick the series of photographs Eve Arnold took in 1959. One shows Crawford studying her lines on the set of “The Best of Everything [the top photo] her hand grazing her hair in concentration. In another you can see her gazing off camera next to Norma Shearer [pictured below] her eyes alight with a smile we can’t fully see, at a party somewhere in Hollywood.

Crawford was in her mid-fifties when Arnold took these pictures. The extreme close-ups of her lining her lips, or another photograph showing the casual intimacy of her in undergarments cradling the phone while speaking to her agent, could have been framed as a grotesque representation of what happens as icons age. But Arnold was a photographer of great emotional intelligence. What’s most striking about these photographs is that they express a humanity that doesn’t exist in how many remember her, thanks to “Mommie Dearest." Most of the images deal with Crawford reckoning with her own reflection—both literally in terms of the mirrors surrounding her and metaphorically in terms of how they detail her beauty process. Crawford, perhaps more than almost any female star in classic Hollywood, understood what was expected of her. That beauty and the power it brings comes with its advantages and also a price.

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