After decades of men who couldn’t keep it zipped, tried to cheat her, undermined or underestimated her professionally, Joan Crawford stored enough wattage behind her eyes to illuminate Madison Square Garden.

By the time Joan made Female on the Beach in 1955, she developed an intense glare that had more force than the tracking beams of a prison yard on lock down.

Joan wields a pair of snow-white eyes so cold that polar bears caught frostbite. Matched with luxuriant brows, strong ridge cheekbones, and a chiselled jawline, Joan Crawford has in real life what the men on Mount Rushmore needed granite and scale to achieve: she is monumental.

I finish the episode with a passage from A Portrait of Joan: The Autobiography of Joan Crawford