89: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: Clark Gable, Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton

89: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: Clark Gable, Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton

89: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: Clark Gable, Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton

You Must Remember This - August 23, 2016 - 45:10

By the mid-1930s, Joan Crawford was very, very famous, and negotiating both an affair with 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 the gorgeous but self-destructive starlet Barbara Payton at its center.

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88: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: Douglas Fairbanks Jr. / Our Dancing Daughters to Grand Hotel

August 16, 2016 - 39:29
Joan Crawford’s early years in Hollywood were like - well, a pre-code Joan Crawford movie: a highly ambitious beauty of low birth does...

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90: Six Degrees of Joan Crawford: The Middle Years (Mildred Pierce to Johnny Guitar)

August 30, 2016 - 47:49
Joan Crawford struggled through what she called her “middle years,” the period during her 40s before she remade herself from aging,...

About The Show

You Must Remember This is a storytelling podcast exploring the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century. It’s the brainchild and passion project of Karina Longworth (founder of Cinematical.com, former film critic for LA Weekly), who writes, narrates, records and edits each episode. It is a heavily-researched work of creative nonfiction: navigating through conflicting reports, mythology, and institutionalized spin, Karina tries to sort out what really happened behind the films, stars and scandals of the 20th century.