How does one lower the curtain on a life with as many colorful acts as Joan Bennett’s? That’s the central question of Love Is a Crime’s final episode, cohosted by Karina Longworth and Vanessa Hope, granddaughter of Bennett and Walter Wanger. From a tumultuous marriage with David Wilde to production on her last major hit, Suspiria, Bennett maintained a sense of reinvention until the very end.
The actor was perhaps drawn to her fourth and final husband, whom she met in 1968, for their mutual fringe status, according to Felix Werner, Bennett’s grandson and archive manager. “Joan was essentially, after the shooting, somewhat blackballed in Hollywood. And when you see the moments of her in Dark Shadows, there’s a sadness and a pain in her eyes throughout all of it,” Werner remembers. “You know, she looked sad to me. That’s all I can think of, and that here she had someone who clearly also felt like an outsider.”
The reason for Wilde’s perceived standing as an outcast? A habit of dressing as Gail, his secret female persona. Although the ’60s were a progressive time, conformist ideas about gender and sexuality still ruled over society, stigmatizing Wilde’s fluidity. “A person was categorized as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ ‘straight’ or ‘gay,’” Longworth explains. “David Wilde defied easy categorization, and even today, a straight man who liked to dress as a woman wouldn’t fit neatly into most of the images we see in popular culture of queerness or drag.” Wilde apparently vowed to Bennett that he would stop dressing as Gail, something that could have contributed to their “volatile relationship,” Werner argues.
Despite her fluctuating personal life, Bennett finally found the moment to reclaim her narrative by cowriting 1970’s The Bennett Playbill with Lois Kibbee. She also ended a six-season run on the daytime soap Dark Shadows and accepted a role in Italian horror auteur Dario Argento’s Suspiria. While the film would become legendary in the horror space, its chaotic set served as a reminder that Bennett “was a long, long way away, and many years removed, from the plush comforts of midcentury Hollywood,” as noted by Longworth.
At the persuasion of Wilde, Bennett married him in February 1978. After a devastating (and mysterious) fire at their home in Scarsdale, New York, Bennett’s health began to deteriorate. She would die at age 80 of cardiopulmonary arrest. In a twist straight out of a movie, her funeral was held on December 13, 1990—exactly 39 years, to the day, after Walter Wanger shot Jennings Lang. Following his wife’s death, Wilde would begin living more freely as Gail. But his life remained complicated, and he died by suicide in 2001 at age 83.
While Bennett’s captivating life and career can’t be brought to a tidy conclusion, Hope thinks Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” her grandmother’s favorite song in later years, serves as an ode to her legacy. “I think the song shows Joan’s sense of humor about herself and her love life and a sense of acceptance and forgiveness, and she must have been attracted to it because it’s about an actress and timing, missing her entrance. And when everything goes wrong and you need a few good jokes, that’s when you send in the clowns,” Hope explains. “It’s not about circus clowns. It’s about what fools we are in love and life, and I think Joan must have had a very deep and profound sense of that.”
Listen to the episode above, and be sure to subscribe at listen.vanityfair.com/loveisacrime or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to check out Vanity Fair’s other podcasts, including coverage of the third season of Succession and Impeachment: American Crime Story on Still Watching.
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