Karina: Welcome back to Love is a Crime. In our last episode, we talked about how Walter Wanger rebuilt his career after he was sent to prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang. We'll say it again. Walter Wanger went to prison for shooting a business associate, and he was still welcomed back into Hollywood and given the freedom to produce iconic, daring, Academy award winning films. For Joan Bennett, it was a very different story. As she recalled and her memoir, 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "Without question the shooting scandal and resulting publicity destroyed my career in the motion picture industry. Within a short time it was painfully clear that I was a professional outcast in Hollywood. One of the untouchables, I was ex-communicated. Evidence lies in the fact that before December 13th, 1951 I made 65 movies in 23 years. In the decade that followed, I made five." 

Karina: Walter's comeback took a few years to come together, but immediately after leaving prison he had a job at a studio, even if it was the B studio, Monogram.

Vanessa: Joan didn't have that at all. With Jennings gone, she had no protection from the kind of powerful institutions that helped Walter get back on his feet. 

Karina: And there were other things going against her too. For the rest of her career, she would be marked in some way by her fateful decision to get close to Jennings Lang. As Rocky Lang explains, 

Rocky Lang: Joan had a lot more going against her than my dad did. Again, she had a marriage with an important guy. She had two children who understood what was happening. She had a career that was on the downside that she was trying to recover from just because that's what happens to older actresses as a general rule. 

Michael Gruskoff: Still now, 

Vanessa: This is agent turned producer, Michael Gruskoff. 

Michael Gruskoff: You know, you hit 40 as a movie star, the lesser roles and lesser than money, you know, and you know, you don't get the big deals. 

Karina: It's true that Joan Bennett turned 42 shortly after her husband shot her lover. And we will never know how her career would have evolved as she aged if that hadn't happened. We do know that right before the scandal, she was successfully beginning a third act of her career as the mother and "The Father of the Bride" films. We know that some other actresses of her generation, including Barbara Stanwyck continued to play starring roles. Even sexualized roles throughout their forties and well into the decade of the 1950s. While other actresses of the same age, such as Betty Davis struggled. We know that Bennett was aging more like Barbara Stanwyck than Betty Davis. At 42 Joan looked remarkably the same as she had a decade earlier when she had been one of the most sexualized actresses in Hollywood, but we cannot say what would have happened had she not had an affair. Had her husband not responded by picking up a gun and firing it, and if she had not been made to bear the brunt of the consequences. Walter's actions had the effect of changing Joan's persona once again. This time, though her circumstances were just as dramatic as those faced by the typical heroin in a mid-century woman's picture, Joan's new image was not in tune with the times. 

Vanessa: In the 1950s after World War II women were suddenly meant to get out of the workforce and go back into the kitchen. They were no longer needed in the war effort and were meant to produce babies at home. And this meant that women were valued primarily not for themselves, but for who they were attached to. 

Karina: That ideal did not jive well with the femme fatale that Joan became in real life after the shooting. 

Vanessa: For that reason in Hollywood, she was essentially blacklisted. She might as well have been wearing a scarlet letter. Walter might've been aiming at Jennings, but the effect of the punishment completely landed on Joan. 

Karina: In this episode, we'll explore Joan Bennett's life and career in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and over the course of the next 16 years during which she was as she put it ex-communicated from the film industry. 

Vanessa: And as we trace how she struggled to keep her family fed for nearly two decades, we'll also dive into how her struggles had a lasting impact on her daughters, including my mother. Leaving reverberating effects through the generations, which I'm still unpacking today. This is Love is a Crime I'm Vanessa Hope 

Karina: and I'm Karina Longworth. In the months after the shooting, Joan was stunned to find that all offers for her to make movies had suddenly dried up. So in early 1952, before Walter's sentencing, she took the only job she could get. Replacing Rosalind Russell in a touring production of the hit Broadway show, "Bell Book and Candle." 42 year old, Joan was playing the role that 25 year old Kim Novak would immortalize in the 1958 film version, a Bohemian, sexy witch. By now, newspaper editors were looking for new angles on the scarlet Joan story and they found one with her new gig. 

Vanessa: There's a headline about "Bell Book and Candle" being a tale of modern witchery and how the heroine puts the male publisher under her spell, but because she falls in love with him she ultimately loses her power. And I think that has resonance with what happened to Joan in real life. Beware of falling in love with men, because it means as a woman that you'll lose your power. 

Karina: The tour began with a nearly three month stand in Chicago where Joan and the play got great reviews. Shelley and Stephanie came to stay with their mother, and for a while it looked like Joan had found a new stability. But later at a stop on the tour in Texas, an angry audience threw tomatoes at the play's female star. Going on the road meant Joan was able to work away from the small town judgment of Hollywood. And she hoped bringing her daughters would shield them from the worst of the blow-back of their parents' decisions and mistakes, but Joan's private life had become national news. And it would continue to make headlines for months, even years. These headlines seeped into young Stephanie's psyche. 

Vanessa: The very experience of having your parents private lives and marriage on the front page of every paper was very traumatizing. Growing up my mother didn't talk about the scandal until I reached the age that she was when it happened to her, which was about eight or nine. And so I think it was full of unconscious bias about how her father was mistreated and her mother, but I think really her sympathy lay with her father and that would have been completely in sync with the way it would have appeared in the paper and been judged by society at the time. I know it's so awful for her because to this day, my mother cannot actually really look back at it. That's why she's not speaking on our podcast. Not because she doesn't want us discussing it, but because she doesn't like to recall that time period. 

Karina: We're talking about several layers of trauma here. The trauma Walter experienced when he was targeted simultaneously by right-wing politicians, the IRS, the Bank of America, and the FBI led him to neglect Joan. A neglected Joan then began a relationship with Jennings Lang, which further traumatized Walter to the point that he surveilled Joan and then followed her with a gun, which he fired inflicting injury on Jennings and even more trauma on his wife. Then that trauma was magnified and made worse by the press coverage, which followed Joan and her daughters all over the country. The shots fired occupied, literal seconds of time and while Joan's children were not present in that parking lot to see their father fire a gun, they couldn't be kept from a media that recreated those seconds ad infinitum. They couldn't be protected from the idea that in this crime of passion, the blame deserved to be put on the woman who had ignited the passion of both shooter and victim. 

Vanessa: I think the media coverage didn't help the actual incident disappear and become quiet in a way everyone involved would have very much appreciated. In order to protect my mother from the crazy maelstrom of the paparazzi and the story in the press, and in Hollywood, her mother Joan's sent her to a boarding school. And that was not a good experience for my mother. So she found out about it anyway because of the radio news and because all of her classmates knew what was going on. 

Karina: The "Bell Book and Candle" tour lasted for a year. When it ended and Joan returned to Los Angeles, she had much housekeeping to do. She told Walter that any romantic pretense between them was off, but that they should stay together to help raise their daughters. As we discussed in our last episode, this decision had the effect of creating a stable base on which Walter could rebuild his career. But Joan was afforded no such stability. In 1953, Joan couldn't get hired in Hollywood. She found herself performing in a play with Debbie Reynolds at the Dallas state fair. There were no offers for a major Hollywood films until 1954, when Joan appeared in a supporting role in a Christmas caper comedy called "We're No Angels." Joan would not have even played this part, which in size and significance was well below any role she had played in at least a decade and a half, if not for the intervention of the film's biggest star Joan's friend, Humphrey Bogart. 

Vanessa: Technically she had been cast and "We're No Angels" before the shooting and Humphrey Bogart made sure that she stayed in the picture after the shooting when the studio wanted to kick her off. Bogart stood up for Joan. He refused to do the picture without her. I'm sure it meant more to her at that most vulnerable and difficult time than words can ever express. 

Karina: Bogart's gesture was emotionally meaningful, but one movie was not going to solve Joan's larger problems. In the mid 1950s, she finally had to sell her beloved house. It had become too expensive to maintain. Walter was still in debt and his salary at Monogram was less than he was used to earning. With Hollywood movies mostly off the table, Joan's earning potential was diminished too.

Vanessa: She'd been out on the road making as much money as she could, but the house was very expensive to run. Part of it was closed off and depressing because she didn't have enough help. It was just Elizabeth, her cook and a nanny, and it was way too big a house to run on what she was making. 

Karina: Joan sold her house to Hal Wallis, the producer who had won the best picture Oscar for "Casa Blanca." Vanessa's family remembers the sale price as being around $200,000, which would be equivalent to $2 million today. Joan's former house is still standing. According to Variety in 1998, it was purchased by Jimmy Iovine of Interscope Records and Beats by Dre fame and its estimated worth as of 2021 is almost $45 million. The sale felt like a great loss for Joan who had overseen the design and construction of that house and paid for it herself twice. First in the late 1930s when it was initially built, and then again after it was partially destroyed in the Mother's Day fire of 1943. On the other hand, Joan now no longer had this albatross on her back. She'd soon leave Los Angeles for New York. But first she'd make one last major Hollywood film. In which ironically, she'd play a stereotypical 1950s wife whose perfect home constitutes the bulk of her identity. Joan had always done her best work and films directed by auteurs. Most of them European exiles. No one fit that bill better than Douglas Sirk, who had narrowly escaped Nazi Germany and landed in Hollywood in 1939. After a decade, plus as a director for hire who cranked out assignments in every genre from cowboys and indians westerns to Hollywood satire. In the early fifties, Sirk found a niche at Universal as the director of melodramas, like "Magnificent Obsession" and "All That Heaven Allows." These were both tortured romances infused with social critique, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Sirk's movies gave a big boost to Wyman's career, which like many female stars of that era was stuttering as she approached 40. Sirk would provide a similar service to another aging star, Lana Turner, by casting her in his remake of "Imitation of Life." Sirk's movies confirmed the glamor of maturing stars like Wyman and Turner while also bolstering their perceived humanity. Joan Bennett was not so lucky. 

Vanessa: In Douglas sirk's movie, "There's Always Tomorrow," Joan plays a shrewish stay at home mother who's wrapped up in her children's lives and inattentive to her husband, played by Fred MacMurray. He conspires to cheat on Joan with Barbara Stanwyck. 

Karina: Like many of the most interesting Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, "There's Always Tomorrow" suggests that the post-war suburban dream, in which a man makes a great living in the city and comes home at night to a beautiful home kept by a capable wife who takes care of everything, including their kids is actually a nightmare of repression. The Fred MacMurray character is given a pass for looking for sex outside the home because his wife, played by Joan, seems to have cut off her own sexuality entirely in order to focus on motherhood and homemaking. 

Vanessa: Sexually available is another layer, but she's not even personally available to him. She's really concerned first and foremost with their children. And he's not even expected to show up as often for the children. She's doing all of it. 

Karina: It's a film about adultery that fully sympathizes with the bored and stifled husband and locates the problem in the housewife and in the nearly grown children who cannot fathom their parents as human beings, who might have needs outside of being parents.

Vanessa: And it's interesting, Joan being cast in that role after the shooting, where she was generally playing the Barbara Stanwyck role before the shooting. 

Karina: In the film noirs of the previous decade, Joan certainly would have been cast in the temptress role, but in "There's Always Tomorrow," the temptress is the heroine. While Joan's homemaker is essentially the villain. The casting was all the more painfully ironic because before the shooting, Joan's star persona had thread a very small needle. She made a living playing often sexually wanted femme fatales while most of the press about her quote unquote 'real life' was about her being the perfect hostess and housewife and busy mother of four. In 1930s and forties Hollywood, an actress needed to have a wholesome offscreen persona if they were going to embody so many bad girls on screen. But by firing two shots at Jennings lane, Walter Wanger had ruined the offscreen image that had sanitized Joan's on screen vixens and made it much more difficult for Joan to actually mother her daughters. 

Vanessa: I know Joan valued being a mother and saw herself as truly aligned with her public persona before the shooting. As an actress, who's off screen life was all about being a mom. I think when Joan became a femme fatale in real life because of the shooting scandal, it was impossible for her to be a good mother to her daughters in the way she would have liked. I think there's little more painful and resonant than shame and humiliation as emotions. And there's nothing worse for a social person like Joan, who was an actress who thrives on work that demands sociability to feel discriminated against and excluded. I think it must have been bleeding into her parenting. I know it was hard on my mother and her sisters surviving those difficult times. When the two parents who are meant to love and protect, you have suddenly disappeared and left you to fend for yourself and try to figure out how to grow on your own and parent yourself. 

Karina: At the movie's end Joan's sexless, matronly housewife comes out victorious in that her home doesn't get broken up. But the way the film is made, the audience feels that this is a tragedy because the husband has to put away his fantasies of true fulfillment. And he's stuck with his wife and kids in the prison of suburbia. When you watch Joan play this role, it feels as though she's being punished for ruining her offscreen image as the perfect homemaker by being forced into playing the homemaker as ball breaker. While Stanwyck, three years Joan's senior, gets to play the glamorous liberated career woman. 

Vanessa: In real life, Joan was almost living the Fred MacMurray role. She was done with her marriage and would soon enjoy relationships with men who were not Walter, but she still remained shackled to the husband whose reckless violence had destroyed her career and her home and family. 

Karina: With nothing going on for Joan and movies she returned to theater. In 1956, she began a run in a play called "Janice" in which Joan started as a working woman who realizes she needs both her husband and her creative collaborator, her work husband, in order to be happy. Given casting approval over the role of her husband, Joan chose a theater veteran named Donald Cook, as they toured with the show, Joan and Donald became close. Going from city to city they were relatively free to enjoy one another's company. As Walter was in Los Angeles busy with his comeback. After Janice, Joan and Donald were cast as the parents of a sexually maturing teenage girl in a Broadway bound show called "Love Me Little." Joan told Walter that when the play closed she would move back to Los Angeles. But she was so enjoying her relative success on stage and her relationship with Donald Cook that she hoped the play would run forever. Unfortunately for Joan, "Love Me Little" bombed on Broadway and Joan was forced to take a cold, hard look at how she wanted to spend her future. She missed her youngest daughters desperately. Shelley was still only 10 years old. But she didn't want to go back to playing house with Walter. She confessed her unhappiness with Walter, who she called Pop in a letter she wrote to her eldest daughter, Diana in April, 1958. 

Joan Bennett [Reenactment]: "I missed the children so much I ache. I want them with me. I don't want to uproot them, but I don't want to sit across the table from Pop's grumpy face and make phoney conversation for the benefit of the children. I'm sick of living a lie with him. I'm sick of living a lie period. I'm thoroughly miserable and I don't know what to do about it. What a mess. What a life. Why can't people live and let live? Pop has always had his cake and eaten it too. Yet that's what he accuses me of wanting. He makes me feel like a wanton, wicked neglectful mother. A harpy, a bitch and everything awful."

Karina: With no work for her in California, Joan wanted to move to New York where she could act in theater and be with Cook. But Wanger threatened her that if she were to file for divorce, he'd wage, a custody battle and make sure to win. So they stayed married. And Joan took a series of apartments in New York while making a living in Summer Stock and touring theater. She and Donald frequently acted together, and Joan felt that being with him and working with him, made her a much better theatrical actress. Though Donald drank too much, they were happy. Until he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1961. Joan's next boyfriend, John Emory was a friend of Donald's who Joan became close to when they were both in mourning. Joan and Joan were together for three years before he died of cancer in 1964. 

Vanessa: Joan adored Donald Cook and thought he was a wonderful actor. My mom probably always only saw him half lit, so that might explain the lack of an impression he made on her. My mother thought that he had no personality whatsoever. John Emory was much sweeter, my mom thought, but both seemed like very needy men. Both were good actors and Joan looked after them. But to my mother, neither of them were even close to Walter. They didn't have his flair or his charm, and they weren't interested in children. 

Karina: Joan had now had two potential partners die while waiting for Walter to grant her a divorce. In the fall of 1965, Walter finally consented and Joan went to Mexico to end the marriage quickly. The big change was that Walter was now in a relationship himself with gossip, columnist, Suzy. 

Vanessa: With the divorce from Walter, the chapter of Joan's life that had begun with those shots fired in December, 1951 reached a conclusion of sorts, but the previous decade and a half had left their mark. Fittingly Joan would find a new lease on her professional life playing a woman haunted by her past.

Joan Bennett [Acting]: Inside the great house of Collinwood, a seance has been held in an effort to establish contact with the supernatural. But at this moment, life of the six members of the seance has suddenly come to a standstill for one of their members has mysteriously disappeared and been transported back through time and space. Victoria Winters has begun a terrifying journey into the past.

Karina: That was the voice of Joan Bennett doing the opening voiceover to episode 366 of "Dark Shadows", the daily soap opera on which Joan starred from 1966 to 1971. "Dark Shadows" was conceived as a serialized Gothic romance inspired by great literature. In fact, the series began with a plot line about a locked room and a governess, which was directly inspired by Jane Eyre.

Kathryn Leigh Scott: We started out as what would be known as a bodice ripper, a good old fashioned, Gothic romance. 

Vanessa: This is Kathryn Leigh Scott. Kathryn co-starred with Joan on "Dark Shadows," and though she was more than 30 years younger than Joan, the two would become close friends. "Dark Shadows" was not an instant hit. It only caught on with audiences when creator Dan Curtis, in a last ditch effort at drawing eyeballs introduced a new family member, the vampire Barnabas Collins played by Jonathan Frid. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: And I was there the very first day when Jonathan came on the set, you know, with the wolves head cain, and the cape and the teeth, the whole works. And I remember Joan turning to me and she said, oh dear, goblins and ghosts now, I guess. What have we signed on for? None of us were prepared for it, but bringing on the vampire is really what changed the day.

Karina: The introduction of Barnabas and of subsequent plot lines about his past, which sometimes necessitated time travel, pushed "Dark Shadows" into a realm of supernatural fantasy that appealed to younger viewers. Now "Dark Shadows" became an addictive hit, inspiring merch sales, a pop hit on the billboard charts, spinoff films, and the recent timbered and directed remake. Starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas and Michelle Pfeiffer in the role originated by Joan. Tim Burton was in elementary school when "Dark Shadows" was on the air, which weirdly made him part of this supernatural soap operas core demographic. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: One of the big draws about "Dark Shadows" is that, uh, werewolves vampires, the supernatural, they are outsiders. And we have so many fans, who even today send me letters saying the happiest moments of my childhood were sitting with my grandma on the sofa watching "Dark Shadows". You got me through a terrible period of my life. I think children, and so many do feel like outsiders and they're bullied and so on and I've always thought, you know, whatever happened on the playground that day, at least you weren't bitten by a vampire.

Josh Braun: It was on ABC afterschool, so I would run home from school, you know, instead of, I don't know, whatever other kids did, although a lot of my classmates at that time loved "Dark Shadows". 

Karina: This is Josh Braun. Josh is an independent film sales agent and producer who has worked with people like David Cronenberg and Errol Morris and on recent documentaries, like "Wild, Wild Country." And he was one of many kids in the 1960s who first became aware of Joan Bennett because he was obsessed with "Dark Shadows". 

Josh Braun: You know, it had ghost, it had vampires, it had witches, it was kind of like this, you know, really like buffet of great things that kids want. And it was right when, when I first started watching, it was when there was actually a song called "Quentin's Theme" that became a top 10 hit. And the storyline was largely around this character David Collins, who was being sort of haunted by this ghost and Quentin and a lot of the storylines did revolve around trying to drive Joan Bennett crazy or think that she was, you know, imagining things. It's funny because I remember the character, as you know, in my mind it was like the stern and mean spirited matriarch. Who was kind of mean to everybody and mean to David and, you know, mean to Victoria Winters, and mean to everybody. And watching it more recently I don't, it doesn't, it's not that at all, really, but, you know, that's, I think when you're eight or nine, it just falls into an archetype and so she just seemed like she was like the mean mom. In a certain way, Joan is really the most interesting character. The through line and the continuity was almost completely through Joan and, you know, that was also the role she served as the matriarch of the family and so she was always sort of, in some ways, it all came back around to her. 

Karina: Joan played Elizabeth Collinswood, the middle aged mother of a cute blonde teenage daughter named Caroline and the mistress of her extended family's creepy New England mansion. Which when the show begins, Elizabeth has not left for 18 years. For reasons that are initially mysterious, her life has been in suspended animation. As someone who was still piecing together a new life, 15 years after a shooting had blown her old one apart, Joan could relate. But she didn't take the part of Elizabeth because she loved the material. 

Vanessa: According to my mother, Joan thought that "Dark Shadows" was the most ridiculous thing she'd ever read, but they were paying Joan a lot of money to do the show and people her age weren't getting a lot of jobs. So she was happy to have the work.

Karina: Joan had accepted the job out of financial necessity. Assuming there was no way the show would last more than a few episodes. She was extremely wrong. Joan would end up appearing in nearly 400 episodes of "Dark Shadows" over the course of six seasons. It would be the most difficult gig of her life. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: When we were doing "Dark Shadows", it was live and it was sent out as kinescope to all of the affiliates, but we did it live including the one minute commercials and it was during the commercial breaks that we would run from one set to the next. And we started at eight o'clock in the morning and we finished at six o'clock at night, but we started with a blocking rehearsal, and then we were down in the studio, uh, blocking and rehearsing. We had a, what we called a stumble through, and then we went live. So you can imagine how difficult that was for somebody like Joan Bennett, who had been used to, um, working in, in movies with multiple takes and a much more leisurely pace. We would do the show live at three o'clock and by 3:30 we were already rehearsing the next day's show. So it was very fast paced and we did have a teleprompter. Uh, some of the older actors, uh, became addicted to it. Uh, but poor Joan was near-sighted. She had difficulty reading it. So, you know, she would spend her weekends learning ahead.

Vanessa: I think her experience was difficult being near-sighted with the teleprompters and not being able to memorize her lines because the scripts were being turned out so last minute. I think the process for her was new and challenging. And I think what's funny about the show is how clunky it is that you can see often the microphone overhead getting into the frame, or you can see the actors staring reading their lines before they say them. It has that kind of raw feeling. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: We're known for our bloopers. We're known for door handles coming off in our hands and, and, uh, actual doors coming off their hinges and, and, uh, people walking through sets and boom mics and, and there was one instance when a light fell down, uh, between the fellow playing my father and me. And without missing a beat, he said, Maggie we've got to get the roofer in.

Karina: Joan didn't always seem totally comfortable in this chaotic environment. But her very presence added stability.

Josh Braun: Watching some of the later episodes in particular, you know, you can see that. I mean, it's funny. I, you almost observed that she's tired of show and they're certain episodes where she just seems like she's just ready to like fall asleep or walk off set. And then there are other episodes where she's so good and she's so the center of it, and she's still riveting that you're reminded like, yeah, she was actually a movie star before she was ever on a soap opera. So she's like the class act that grounds this in something that's of real quality. 

Karina: The work was grueling, but at least it was steady and it put Joan back in the zitgeist. She was a celebrity again. And nobody cared anymore that she had once been in an adultery scandal. The younger generation who hadn't known Joan before "Dark Shadows," also for the most part, hadn't heard about the Jennings Lang shooting. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: Only some of the older actors on the show knew of the scandal. No one ever talked about it. I was in grade school when it occurred so I had no knowledge whatsoever of the shooting. 

Karina: And yet, in having Joan act out various traumas by giving her an entire plot line about a mother sacrificing in her own life to protect her offspring from scandal, "Dark Shadows" seem to draw on Joan's own experiences.

The plot lines on "Dark Shadows" would move glacially. Sometimes the writers would plant a seed in one episode that wouldn't fully blossom for months. About three weeks into the series, there was a scene in which Joan's character Elizabeth, admits to her daughter Carolyn, that she knows it wasn't always easy being her daughter. 

Carolyn [Dark Shadows]: "Mother you're afraid of something and it's much more than just this accident."

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Oh no, no that's not true." 

Carolyn [Dark Shadows]: "You talk about digging something up out of the past." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Oh what I meant - Carolyn, I remember how difficult it was for you when you went to school and came home crying because the children made fun of you. 'Carolyn's mother is a witch.' I haven't forgotten how you used to sob.

Carolyn [Dark Shadows]: "I survived." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I hated myself for making you suffer." 

Karina: Viewers of " Dark Shadows" tuned in every day for crumbs of details about what was really going on in Elizabeth's house. But it would be another 250 episodes before the show would answer why Elizabeth had been housebound for so long. In episode 271, on the verge of being forced to marry Jason, a man who was blackmailing her, Elizabeth confesses that she believed she killed her first husband and that his body is buried in a trunk in the basement. That's why she didn't leave the house for 18 years. She had to be there to protect her secret shame and to prevent the scandal from hurting her daughter.

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Roger, try to understand. I haven't kept this terrible secret all these years because I wanted to escape the law. I haven't wanted to tell the truth because I was terrified of what it would do to Carolyn." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "Well, she will understand in time." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Will she?" 

Karina: Over the course of three episodes, it's revealed that the husband actually faked his death and worked with blackmailer Jason to steal a portion of Elizabeth's fortune. These men conspired to gaslight Joan's character into believing that she was guilty of a crime that had never happened, which led her to punish herself with self imprisonment for 18 years. When she discovers that her husband's body is not buried in the basement, that he's not even dead, she breaks down. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "But I've kept this little room locked. I, I haven't left Collinswood for 18 years to be sure nobody came down here and found out." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "Come on Liz, let's go back upstairs." "

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "I've been a prisoner because of this room." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "Liz." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Well there's nothing there, nothing." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "No nothing but an empty old trunk. 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "But why have I lived like this? Why did I kept garnering in this room? Why have I dreamt night off night that someone came down here and found out? Why have I had these nightmares night after night after night?" 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "You took money from her. Business money." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Roger, please don't you understand I only want to be rid of this man once and for all." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "Liz we cannot let him do what he did and then get away." 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "What would you prefer? Public charges brought against him, followed by a public prior?" 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "You didn't think of that now did you?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "The humiliation for me telling everyone what I've been through. I can't do it Roger." 

Roger [Dark Shadows]: "Do we have to let him go?" 

Joan Bennett [Acting]: "Please, yes. I never wanted to hear his name again. You know what I've been through already." 

Vanessa: When the sheriff comes and there's the opportunity to do something about this scoundrel. And she says, no, I couldn't face the public humiliation of the scandal, I found it interesting how Joan was experiencing maybe reliving in a transmuted way some of the trauma that she had experienced with the shooting incident with Walter when she was on "Dark Shadows." That had me wondering, did Dan Curtis the creator of "Dark Shadows," take inspiration from Joan's career and her own public humiliation? Was there a reason he wanted to cast her in that lead role of the matriarch who pays the price for the misdeeds of men?

Karina: Dan Curtis must have been aware of the shooting scandal that had cleaved Joan's career into before and after. Although even Kathryn Leigh Scott, isn't sure if that's why he cast her.

Kathryn Leigh Scott: I have no idea what went on between Joan and Dan and whether Joan said, 'I am not doing that.' Or with her sense of humor, you never know, she might've thought that it was amusing. But there were things that went on in the, in the early days of, of "Dark Shadows" that, you know, you could imagine were kind of torn from the headlines of Joan's own life. Again, it went over our heads, the young ones, but I'm sure it resonated with Joan. 

Karina: Today, most of the biggest movies of any given year could be categorized as science fiction or a horror. But in the 1960s, when an actress of Joan's generation reached a point where they were getting offers to do work in those genres, it was usually a sign of how far they had fallen down the Hollywood ladder. It was definitely a sign that the industry thought they were old. The classic example of this is "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which had been released four years before "Dark Shadows" began and which touched off a wave of movies, which would come to be known as hag horror. But even in that context, Joan's work in "Dark Shadows" was different. Her character was never depicted as grotesque. And if anything, she was usually a sympathetic victim of the supernatural .In this sense, "Dark Shadows" allowed Joan Bennett to flip the script of what would have been expected of her. Both as an aging, Hollywood star, and as a woman who had been vilified for her role in a love triangle with a violent end. 

Vanessa: My family joked that Joan was forced to play nothing but witches is after the shooting. And she was no longer going to play the kind of roles that she had played before. And that society looked at her as the witch in a way. And that felt like you couldn't write that. You know, you couldn't script that that's like life is stranger than fiction sometimes. 

Karina: Two years into Joan's run on "Dark Shadows," Walter Wanger would have a fatal heart attack. Joan attended Walter's funeral with a new man in her life who had turned out to be the last man of her life. And he would bring into Joan's life one last psychosexual drama. 

Vanessa: We'll meet that man. And talk about the end of Joan Bennett's life and her legacy in the next and final episode of Love is a Crime

Love is a Crime is a Vanity Fair presentation in partnership with Cadence 13. Executive produced created, written, and hosted by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth. Starring Zooey Deschanel as Joan Bennett. Our executive producer is Chris Corcoran and our showrunner is Jacquelyn Jamjoom. Production support provided by Nico Steele, Julia Doyle, Tony Mantia, and Lindsay D Shoenholtz. The music composed by Lionel Cohen and Vybbes. Audio produced and supervised by Shelby Comstock Britten and mixed by Gintas Norvilla and Rainhouse. Special thanks to Katey Rich from Vanity Fair and Julie Shen and Kelly Bales from Condé Nast. 

Karina: Love is a Crime was written by Vanessa Hope and Karina Longworth who consulted the following published sources in researching this episode. "The Bennetts: An Acting Family," by Brian Kellow, published by the University Press of Kentucky, used by permission from the University Press of Kentucky. "Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent," by Matthew Bernstein, published by the University of Minnesota Press, used by permission from the University of Minnesota Press. "The Bennett Playbill," by Joan Bennett, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston used by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC, the Joan Bennett estate and the Lois Kibbee estate. This episode includes interviews with Rocky Lang, Michael Gruskoff, Kathryn Leigh Scott, and Josh Braun. This episode also includes clips from episodes 366, 21, 273, and 288 of the television series, "Dark Shadows". Fact checking by Laura Bullard.