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The Faces of Vanity Fair

By David Look

Saturday October 11, 2008

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR. AND JOAN CRAWFORD: Recently married and photographed in 1929, Fairbanks Jr. revealed in an essay for Vantiy Fair about his wife, “She will stand by a belief with Trojan ferocity.… When she is depressed she falls into an all-consuming depth of melancholy out of which it is practically impossible to recover her. At these times she has long crying spells.… She is extraordinarily nervous.… She is intolerant of people’s weaknesses.… She has a tendency to dramatize any anecdote which she may relate.… She is a ten-year-old girl who has put on her mother’s dress—and has done it convincingly.” They were married 4 years.