Karina: Welcome back to Love is a Crime. Joan Bennett first became a grandmother at age 39 when her daughter Diana had her first of four kids with husband Jack Anderson. Joan's eighth grandchild was born in 1966 when Diana's affair with Oskar Werner, the striking Austrian actor who had played Jules in "Jules and Jim" resulted in a son named Felix Werner. 

Vanessa: My cousin Felix oversees his father's massive archive as well as a smaller archive of press clippings and memorabilia related to our grandmother, Joan Bennett. Throughout the process of making this show Karina and I have met with Felix several times combing through his archives and asking him questions about our family. He's a little older than me. And as the youngest child of Joan's eldest daughter, he was able to spend some time with Joan during the last decades of Joan's life. He also got to know Joan's fourth and final husband. Many times I asked Felix if we could record our conversation with him, and every time he said no. Until the last time I asked when he suddenly said yes. 

Karina: Today in our final episode, Felix will be one of several voices who will help us understand the final phase of Joan Bennett's life and her final marriage to a man named David Wilde, who was also known as a woman named Gail. I'm Karina Longworth, 

Vanessa: and I'm Vanessa Hope. This is Love is a Crime.

Karina: Joan Bennett bonded with her co-star in "Dark Shadows", 23 year old, Kathryn Leigh Scott, who was an infant during the peak of Joan's stardom, and happens to be exactly the same age as Vanessa's mother. Joan was playing an older woman on TV, but she wasn't living like one in her free time. Kathryn remembers her as being extremely in tune with the younger generation.

Kathryn Leigh Scott: Well, it was the sixties, which was the disco era. And Joan went to all of the nightclubs and discos, including the Peppermint Lounge, where even Greta Garbo did the twist and Arthur's and Shepherds' and Lunterdee, they were all our favorite places. And one night I went with my boyfriend to Cerebrum, which was a sensory experiential club. And when you arrived at the door, you were given this voluminous shroud to put on, and then you had to take off all of your street clothes underneath and toss them into a paper bag that was checked. And wearing the shroud you went into the inner sanctum. It had carpeted platforms. And you sat in the dark with strobe lights flashing and you were given soap bubbles and cotton balls and bunches of cellophane to play with while listening to sitar music. It was wild. Anyway, the next day I was at rehearsal and I was telling everyone about this place and Joan said, oh, yes, that place I went there opening night. 

Karina: It was on a more sedate night that Joan met David Wilde. 

Felix Werner: He just told me that they met at a party and then they ended up talking in the kitchen and they ended up talking for something like three or four hours.

Vanessa: This is my cousin Felix Werner. 

Felix Werner: And I was thinking about this, you know, knowing that we were going to do this reflecting on like, well, what attracted them to each other? And I think on some level at that point in her career and just David, because of his lifestyle, they were both outsiders. You know, Joan was essentially after the shooting, somewhat blackballed, you know, 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. And, uh, and I just, you know, she looks sad to me. That's all I can think of. And that he or she had someone who clearly also felt like an outsider. 

Karina: The reason why David felt like an outsider was that he had a secret, which he didn't reveal to Joan until he had known her for quite a while. After separating from his first wife in 1960, Wilde moved to Greenwich Village and became part of a community of what were then called cross dressers. In private, he cultivated a female persona called Gail. We think of the sixties as a time of liberation, but even in 1968, when Joan met David, very strict ideas about gender and sexuality still prevailed. And there was no open conversation about fluidity. A person was categorized as male or female. Straight or gay. 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.

Susan Stryker: They actually show up, uh, I believe as a character. And one of the best, uh, historical accounts of that community, which was a book called "A Year Among the Girls," uh, written by somebody named Darryl G Raynor uh, which is, um, most likely a pseudonym. 

Vanessa: This is Susan Stryker. A trans historian and the author of the book, "Transgender History, the Roots of Today's Revolution."

Susan Stryker: It's a really uh, um, sort of exploration of this incredibly hidden, incredibly stigmatized world of people who think of themselves as men, think of themselves as heterosexual, but enjoy presenting themselves in a feminine way and relating to other, um, people assigned male at birth who have feminine inclinations and these like very secluded social settings. You know, I can private clubs or weekend getaways up in the Catskill Mountains. 

Karina: If you've watched the show "Transparent," you may remember an episode in the first season, which flashes back to a retreat Maura attended in 1994 when she was still presenting as a straight married man most of the time, but dressing as a woman in secret. At first Maura finds Camp Camellia to be liberating, but she's surprised and disappointed to learn that other people at the camp don't see transition as a goal. If anything they're bigoted against people who take that step. In this clip, you're going to hear characters gossip about a camper who was ostracized after being caught taking hormones.

Character 1 from "Transparent": "Somewhere, I dunno, what last year she decided, he decided, to go all the way. I mean, it was full tilt. He changed his name from Raul to Ramona and everything. All time." 

Character 2 from "Transparent": "Yeah, we're not judging dear. We're not judging." 

Character 1 from "Transparent": "I am judging. I am judging. We are cross dressers, but we're still men." 

Character 2 from "Transparent": "Well, we are men." 

Character 1 from "Transparent": "Cheers." 

Character 2 from "Transparent": "We are men who wear skirts!" 

Karina: In the 1960s, in the years between Wilde's divorce and meeting Joan, Gail attended a real life equivalent of this retreat called Casa Susanna started by Susanna Valenti. Valenti would eventually announce her intention to transition and live full time as Susanna. But during the time that she would have known David slash Gail, Valenti advocated living dual lives. Being a straight man, married to a straight woman with a separate female persona for performing in drag shows or cross dressing privately. 

Susan Stryker: It's a lot of guys saying like, 'Hey, just because I like to, you know, dress up in high heels and a frilly skirt and wear makeup, it doesn't mean that I'm homosexual.' You know, it's like, I'm, I'm, I'm a man's man. I love women. I love my wife. I have no interest in being gay. I'm not attracted to men, uh, and at the same time, you know, they were often anti transsexual. It's like, I don't want to alter my genitals. I don't want any medical procedures. It's like, this is just, you know, a hobby or, um, a way that I have of expressing myself for, for fun or with people who share a similar interest.

Vanessa: Susan Stryker suggests that men who consider themselves straight, like David, may have been drawn to such communities in reaction to the binary gender stereotypes that the culture expected them to conform to in the early 1960s. 

Susan Stryker: That kind of rigid segregation of gender, uh, and the kind of violence that was connected with, um, mainstream masculine culture, that kind of machismo, particularly when it's being used to build, you know, weapons systems and nuclear bombs and all of that, that, there's something that's actually quite deadly about that. You know, that it's, um, maybe what now gets called toxic masculinity. 

Karina: Whether or not Joan immediately sensed that there was something different about David, there was a lot about him that Joan found attractive. 

Vanessa: Joan liked to talk about how she and David both loved the theater that he had been a theater critic, gone to Yale, worked on Wall Street, and he was from a nice family. What was great about David for Joan was that he got her out of the house. They went on cruises together. She would be invited to talk about her movies and she enjoyed that. And she wouldn't have done that if he hadn't encouraged her.

Karina: As Felix notes, David fit a certain pattern in terms of Joan's relationships. 

Felix Werner: You know, you look back on the men that Joan decided to marry, and they were interesting, you know, none of them bad people at all. Just somehow unavailable and somehow representing something that she might've wanted, but never got. And I think David was sort of the perfect ending to that.

Karina: Kathryn Leigh Scott got to know David well. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: David Wilde was, um, he was a pugnacious, good-looking sort of bantamweight guy. He always reminded me of James Cagney. He was the last person in the world. You'd expect to see in a dress and blue eyeshadow, but that's also who David was. 

Karina: As you can imagine, in 1968, Joan Bennett and her circle had to figure out how to reconcile these new revelations with the David Wilde they thought they knew. When David finally confided in Joan about Gail, he asked his friend Harry Benjamin to meet with Joan to help her understand. 

Susan Stryker: Harry Benjamin wrote a book in 1966 called the "Transsexual Phenomenon," that basically lays out the medical treatment protocols that are still largely in place today. So he was the, you know, the expert on all things trans in the, you know, I would say from the mid 1950s into the 1970s and eighties. He would have been a person who would have helped Joan understand distinctions between like different flavors of transness. You know, like if a heterosexual woman is married to a man who she discovers is cross dressing, you know, does she think, oh, he's gay and Harry Benjamin could say no, no, dear, it's fine your husband just likes to wear your dresses that's all it is. 

Karina: Even if Harry Benjamin could help provide context. The fact was that cross dressing wasn't just socially unacceptable in the 1960s, in many places it was illegal. The criminalization fed into stigmatization, which increased the need for subterfuge and compartmentalization. David told Joan he would stop cross-dressing now that they were together, she believed him. They settled into a relationship full of tension and odd power dynamics. 

Felix Werner: And, you know, Joan and David, they had a fairly volatile relationship. They were always at each other, uh, basically always arguing about this or that. David was a little bit like a pit bull. He would, he would love to pick fights with anyone. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: David was also fiercely protective of Joan and very controlling. He drove his car, he drove his car like a mad man. He was just crazy. Uh, but he was also warm and, and he was very blunt spoken. 

Vanessa: It was David Wilde who used to like to go to clubs when he was on the scene dating Joan, he would drag her around because when he was out with her, he was Mr. Joan Bennett and he would get attention and he liked to feed off of her celebrity. 

Felix Werner: You know, part of his rage and anger was connected to that, that he couldn't live the life he wanted. Also that when he was with Joan, uh, you know, that she forbid him to dress as Gail. 

Vanessa: Joan didn't want her family to know about David's cross dressing, but one day Joan found women's clothes and David's closet. She called my mother in tears and told my mom that he had promised he'd never wear them while they were together.

Karina: In 1970 with "Dark Shadows" having revived her stardom and books like Betty Davis' "The Lonely Life" and Heddy Lamarr's, "Ecstasy and Me" having created a market for tell all's from stars of Hollywood's golden age, Joan was contracted to write her own memoir. Joan interviewed a number of co-writers and to ended up hiring Lois Kibbee. Kibbee had co authored one previous book, "The Life Story of Christine Jorgensen" who had become famous in the 1950s for being the first American to publicly discuss having had what was then called a sex change operation. Joan clearly felt her own story would need to be handled just as sensitively as Jorgensen's. She was not an open book with anyone and did not confide much to Kibbee in order to produce something book length, Kibbee fleshed out Joan's story with the stories of all of the actors in the Bennett family. The resulting book titled "The Bennett Playbill" obscures as much as it reveals. But it does feature Joan copying to a more intimate relationship with Jennings Lang than she had previously. And even in holding back, Joan was being herself. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: The one thing that I do really love about the, the book that she wrote with Lois Kibbee is that it is totally written in Joan's voice. You can hear her in every sentence and she has remarkable insight, but I always felt that about Joan. And she, she appears to shy away from talking about certain things, but, but that's also Joan and it's also a kind of reticence that I think that people of that generation had. 

Karina: When "Dark Shadows" ended its run in 1971, Joan now 61, was excited to get off the treadmill of daily daytime TV. But she also lost her excuse to live in the center of New York City. She was several years into her relationship with David Wilde who began pushing for a move to Scarsdale, Joan agreed somewhat reluctantly. 

Vanessa: Joan's moved to Scarsdale was something she made the best of. David was possessive and insisted on it, and he moved them there. She never really took an interest in it. 

Karina: To the extent that she could, she made the Scarsdale house her own. Moving in what was left of her furniture from the house and Holmby Hills.

Felix Werner: The house was interesting. I mean, it, it looked right out of a film. It was perfectly manicured. David had a rock garden in back that was sort of his passion. You know, they had movie posters up, they had a basement that was sort of like a memorabilia section. There were very strict rules in the house. Joan had a protocol for dinners. You'd sit in that little dining room and they had Carmen their maid who was, you know, dressed and sort of full French maid regalia, black with little white doily. And at some point it was determined that I didn't have quite the manners yet, so I had to eat with Carmen in the kitchen. Joan was very stern and she certainly didn't evoke grandmotherly feelings. I didn't, I never got that. 

Karina: Felix's memories could be colored by the stories his mother Diana told him about growing up with Joan as a mother. Going through the Joan Bennett archives at Felix's house, we came across a trophy that she had been awarded as a publicity stunt, naming her mother of the year. Looking at that trophy Felix had audibly scoffed. And when we got him to sit down in front of the mic, we asked him about that scoff. 

Felix Werner: So I did scoff at- there, they're actually two different mother of the year trophies. And you know, my mother was sent to 13 different schools and during Joan's career, part of that was just because she was working a lot. But part of it, I think was also, she just didn't want to have my mother around. Despite all that my mother absolutely adored her mother. And I also think the vulnerability that Joan had as a young woman and the affection that she had, she was able to give probably more to my mother than any of her other children. That said, my mother would bite her fingernails because she was nervous. So they put boxing gloves on my mother and strapped her to the bed so she couldn't move at night. Um, or if my mother wouldn't finish her food, it would stay on the table until the next morning and she had to eat it. And so those were just things that, you know, I found out later, but they, they concurred with my experience of Joan as a child and being frightened in the Scarsdale house because she was very stern.

Vanessa: My memories of Joan as a grandmother are few and far between, and maybe she never had to be strict with me, or maybe as my mother remembers it, Joan favored me. But my memories of Joan, whether she was coming to see me star in high school production of "Oklahoma" and sitting in the front row singing along or at home when she visited us this one time, insisting that we drink prune juice at night and wear slippers and robes over our pajamas was that she was very warm. She seemed at the same time, old and small and frail to me, but I remember her smile and her laugh and her kind of mid Atlantic theater accent. She had a cigarette cough and a kind of sense of amusement at the absurdity of life. 

Karina: Felix's memories of Joan are much harsher than Vanessa's and are also probably not in line with how an aging movie star would have wanted to be remembered. At this stage of her life, Joan was confronted every day with the question of how people would remember her via an idealized image of her past self that hung in her house. It was the painting of Joan that had been the centerpiece of Fritz Lang's "The Woman in the Window," and it would be displayed in the Scarsdale house for the rest of Joan's life. It captured Joan at the peak of her beauty and fame. And as time went on, the painting increasingly served as a reminder of what Joan no longer was. We asked Felix if in his opinion, Joan spent her time in Scarsdale feeling fulfilled by her career and her life. 

Felix Werner: No, not at all. That's not the impression I got, she had that slightly glassy-eyed look that, that you can see in a depressed person, um, just not quite being present. I think it was interesting towards the end and it got sadder is that all those things were sort of crumbling around her, including her looks. And so she was left with quite a bit of loneliness. 

Karina: Joan's career wasn't fully over. She performed in Summer and Winter Stock productions and she would make one more important film, which we'll get to, but her life in Scarsdale with David Wilde was in many senses a retirement. Just as Walter had in the last years of his life, Joan spent some time looking back. And not always in darkness. Kathryn Leigh Scott remembers wonderful visits to Scarsdale. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: They invited me for lunch and, and Joan and I spent the afternoon talking. And I think that was the beginning of our, our real friendship. And I would go up there and spend occasional weekends in Scarsdale and Joan and I would sit up until all hours talking. David would of course leave us alone because it was all girl talk, you know, all about clothes and boys, except the boys that Joan told tales about where Ronald Colman, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable. Uh, I was just so much fun. She was very funny and, and she was full of stories. And then Joan would take me up to her attic and she, uh, she'd unlock the door and we'd go into her special closet and look through these beautifully organized racks of ball gowns and cocktail dresses. And then she'd tell me where she had worn them. Just wonderful stories. And then another time it was two o'clock in the morning, we were sitting there drinking white wine and watching all of the Scarlett O'Hara screen tests, including hers and, you know, I have to say, uh, it came down to Vivian Lee and Joan Bennett for the role of Scarlett O'Hara, and Joan was wonderful. She would have been wonderful in that role. 

Karina: But many who were close to Joan believed that moving out of the city was not the best thing for her. 'Scarsdale is where you go to die,' said her daughter Diana. Joan's daughter, Melinda added, 'she was not cut out to be a suburban housewife, not at all.' As Kathryn adds, 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: She should never have moved there. That was, that was not the place for her. She belonged in New York. There were so many of her old friends in New York and she was isolated in Scarsdale.

Karina: Joan was able to get to the city a few times a week. She'd go see movies, although she hated how violent Hollywood films were getting in the 1970s. She'd go to plays. Although sometimes she'd get bored during the first act and spend the second reading a book in the ladies lounge. At home in Scarsdale, Joan and David became known for throwing parties, which matched Hollywood of the 1930s in their elegance sophistication. And in the post-prohibition levels of alcohol assumption. 

Vanessa: The friends they had then where people David liked, who were gay, like Richard Stack, who Joan had met in Summer Stock and who my mom thinks David might've had a secret crush on, but been homophobic about. The problem was with David, Joan never saw her own friends and she returned to drinking. Although, because her doctor had warned Joan that she was at risk of cirrhosis, she did modulate her drinking, even with David's. 

Karina: It's possible that Joan was feeling cooped up in Scarsdale when she received a surprising offer. To play one of the headmistresses of a German ballet school in "Suspiria," the new film by Italian horror maestro, Dario Argento. Argento's movies are vivid, visual extravaganzas. They're incredibly rich in terms of color, design and often gore. They're usually just as weak in characterization and plot. Given Joan's rejection of the violence of the new Hollywood cinema, it's somewhat surprising that she agreed to star in a movie in which a woman is graphically impaled in the first 10 minutes, but she hadn't made a real movie in a long time. And David pushed her to do it. If nothing else, it meant they could take a free vacation to Italy. In time, "Suspiria" became a classic, but at that time, Joan found the shoot to be a disappointing experience. The chaos of an Italian horror movie set in the late 1970s only served to remind Joan that she was a long, long way away and many years removed from the plush comforts of mid- century Hollywood. After they returned from Italy, David convinced Joan that they should get married. They had been dating for a decade and Joan was in no hurry to make it official. But David won this argument and the pair tied for knot in February, 1978. A month later in the middle of the night, David and Joan awoke to discover that their house was on fire.

Felix Werner: The only thing I know about the fire is that there were circumstances that we're a little off. I don't know what burned, but I know more memorabilia was lost and a lot of sort of family photos and things, which is why I'm also personally very protective of the memorabilia. But, uh, the fire, there were mysterious circumstances. I know that the insurance company didn't want to pay. They believed there might've been arson involved. 

Vanessa: Apparently David claimed that the fire started because Joan's smoked in bed. Joan did smoke in bed until the end of her life, but was that really the cause? Mom thinks David suggested it, but that it also might've been true that a disgruntled ex of David's might have done it and David blamed it on Joan. 

Karina: This was the second time Joan had been forced to flee her burning home. Third, if you count filming the scene in "The Secret Beyond the Door." Again, her house would have to be partially rebuilt. Again, she was traumatized by the sense that she had just barely gotten out with her life with yet more physical remnants of her past lost forever. After the Scarsdale fire Joan's health began to decline. Her eyesight, always weak, deteriorated further with cataract problems. She turned 80 in 1990 and she had lived a hard life. No one expected her to bounce around like a spring chicken, but as Christmas 1990 approached, Joan was actively preparing for the holiday. On the night of December 7th, 1990, Joan and David sat down for dinner at home with their friend, Richard Stack. Sometime during the evening, Joan's head dropped. David called his friend and Dr., Robert Pearson, but there was nothing that could be done. She was taken to the hospital in nearby White Plains and declared dead on arrival. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: I got a call from David the night that, uh, Joan died and the news really was a shock and I was devastated then I started crying. I w I was weeping and, and, uh, and I could barely speak. And, uh, David seemed surprised that I was taking Joan's deaths so hard, but I think that he thought that I was, I knew that her health was failing and I didn't. But he told me that I should take comfort that she died peacefully at the dinner table. That she'd had a good meal and a glass of wine and, and then she just sat back in her chair and folded in on herself. And those were his words. She sat back in her chair and, and folded in on herself, which was a very nice image to have of Joan's passing. 

Karina: According to Joan's death certificate, she died from cardiopulmonary arrest. The funeral was held on December 13th. 39 years to the day that Walter Wanger shot Jennings Lang.

Vanessa: In the end, Joan didn't leave behind the largest estate. David kept the Scarsdale house where he continued to live and where "The Woman in the Window" painting of Joan continued to hang prominently. That painting of Joan would become the star of one final film noir esque coda to Joan Bennett's story. 

Karina: After Joan died, David began living increasingly openly as Gail.

Felix Werner: He went from zero to a hundred after she passed away, so he was dressing a lot. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: And after Joan passed away, David asked me to publish his memoir, which he called "Skirting the Issue." 

Karina: Kathryn Leigh Scott had begun running a publishing company called Pomegranate Press. Through which she released books largely about the history of show business, many of what she wrote or edited herself.

Kathryn Leigh Scott: And he talked to me about his friendship with a doctor who lived nearby in Scarsdale, and he told me that they met regularly. They put on their makeup, their wigs, their, their frocks together, and then they'd have dinner and dance together in the living room, in front of the picture window. Uh, and I, I actually knew the doctor, my husband and I had dinner with David, the doctor, and the doctor's wife once at a restaurant in New York, so I knew him and there was absolutely nothing secretive about any of this, and I wasn't judgmental about it at all. But I told David that I only published non-fiction entertainment books, not memoir, and that I would suggest other publishers to him, which I did. 

Karina: David never got his memoir published. In his loneliness he also tried to connect with the now 30 something, Felix Werner. 

Felix Werner: Joan had passed away. David would reach out to me because he had had, I guess he had a wonderful time at our wedding. And so he wrote us a beautiful note to Kathryn and me after our wedding and we started conversations. 

Vanessa: In mid 2000, David asked Felix for a big favor.

Felix Werner: He said, you know, I have this painting from "The Woman in the Window" it's been hanging in the house and the film museum in Berlin is reopening. Berlin was going through this huge transformation, and so they wanted their opening exhibit to be on Fritz Lang and they wanted it to be basically on the lost heritage of German culture from the second World War. So Fritz Lang fit perfectly and David reached out and he said to me, look they want this painting. They want me to come, I'm only going to go if you go. And I was like, I don't, I don't really want to do this. There was a part of him that enjoyed the adoration that Joan got wherever she went. But I think there was a part of him that was a little jealous as well. There was a little worry on my part that David could show up as Gail to the events, the opening of the film museum. And he had sort of disclosed to me, you know, in the years prior that he was getting very comfortable going out as Gail and I just thought, all right, well, this is starting to overshadow Joan, and it's your thing.

Karina: David may have become more comfortable dressing as Gail in the 10 years since Joan's, but we have to understand that in the year 2000, the culture as a whole was still not anywhere near as comfortable or accustomed as it is today to seeing gender fluidity in a public space. American culture was in the conventionally macho moment of George W. Bush when gay jokes were prevalent and acceptable. Felix was concerned that if Gail made an appearance in Berlin, all anyone would talk about was that Joan Bennett's husband was dressed like a woman. And this would have been an unusual enough site at the time that his concerned that Gail would be subjected to cruel gossip taking the spotlight off of Joan might have been justified.

Felix Werner: We are talking nearly 20 years ago when things were different, you know, so I thought it would create quite a stir. I said, I'll go, but look just want to make it clear, I don't want to meet Gail at that point. And he was okay with that. So fast forward to the museum event, which was kind of an interesting spectacle in and of itself, it was very emotional, uh, for the Germans. It represented the reunification of Germany, the lost culture, all these things. And here was this painting, which was made kind of a centerpiece of the exhibit as you walked in. And it was a wonderful exhibit. 

Karina: To Felix's relief, David made it through the event without drawing attention to himself and away from Joan and Fritz Lang. 

Vanessa: This was in September 2000. About six months later, when the exhibit in Berlin ended, the painting was sent back to the Scarsdale house. 

Felix Werner: You know, David liked to drink and he rehung the painting when it came back from Berlin. I mean, when he hung it back on the wall, he missed the nail and it put a scratch in the painting, but it kind of, because the painting pretty ugly as it is. It's kind of fits the whole story and the history of it. So I'm never going to take the scratch out. 

Karina: For about a decade, since Joan's death, Wilde had lived alone in Joan's house. Surrounded by the few artifacts she had leftover from the spectacular Holmby Hills home that she had built with the money she had made as a movie star. He had become the de facto guardian of those objects, some of which, like the painting were an embodiment of her legacy. If as Felix says, he drunkenly damaged the painting after attending an event paying tribute to its place in film history, then that speaks to the painful psychological situation that David was in. David had always been attracted to Joan celebrity and glamor. To the star she had been in her prime. Back then Joan had been at the white hot center of a Hollywood that was at the peak of its powers. The focus of fascination and envy coming from the world over. In their relationship, David lived in Joan's shadow. After her death as Gail, he was able to step out of Joan's shadow and to emulate the kind of feminine perfection she had embodied in the middle of the 20th century. He could now walk into Joan's old hangout Sardi's as Gail, maybe even carrying one of Joan's old handbags or wearing a piece of her jewelry, but he couldn't be Joan. He couldn't have anything like her celebrity or feel what she had felt when she was the object of the world's adoring gaze, as one of the most beautiful women in movies. And when he'd get home to Scarsdale, he'd look up on the wall and there was that painting of her. The painting that had been used in one of the original film noirs as evidence of her other worldly feminine allure. Her ability to drive men mad with her sexuality. Imagine being David Wilde wanting to live as Gail, but knowing that even by the year 2001 the world was not a hospitable place for an elderly man dressed as a glamorous woman. That painting was not only haunting reminder of Joan, but after the Berlin trip where he had to keep Gail hidden and seed the spotlight to Joan, once again. It must have served as a reminder that David had not been able to fulfill his own true desires. And that, at the end of the day, being Mr. Joan Bennett was as close as he had come. In other words, though Joan's death had clearly liberated Wilde to spend more time as Gail, David was still pretty unhappy. 

Kathryn Leigh Scott: He would call me often and we would just chat. And it was clear to me that he was despondent about aging and, and we had nothing to live for, uh, after Joan. And then one day Diana called to tell me that he'd, uh, committed suicide. 

Felix Werner: I've always been curious to know if, uh, if he was dressed as Gail, you know, when, when he locked himself in the garage with his beloved Mercedes that he drove so violently and, uh, you know, turned on the car. 

Vanessa: David died in May 2001 at 83. He had killed himself about two months after "The Woman in the Window" painting had come back to him.

This is when my gallows humor comes out. I knew my grandmother had lived a film noir life, but not this noir. How many noir moments can one femme fatale pack in one life? Let alone after death. We could have called this series, "The Woman in the Window," because Joan might as well have been as enigmatic to the men in her life as her image in that painting. 

Karina: Even without the twist epilogue provided by David Wilde. Joan Bennett's story is a difficult one to wrap up neatly, especially for her family. 

Vanessa: I think the effects of the misogynistic treatment of Joan really extended to my mother and somewhat to me. That even if those feelings of discrimination and humiliation lessen over time through generations, they still disrupt a sense of voice and personal narrative. I'm sort of embarrassed to say this, but I think the process of being able to tell the story is healing and has brought closure both from me and my mother and has bonded us. She definitely wanted to suppress the telling of the story and avoid reckoning with it. And now she says she likes seeing Joan's history through my eyes, but I've come to realize that it's really hard to decide what is the sum of anyone's life. I think it's important to ask these questions with a famous person especially, so that we're not making them into a mythical figure, but considering how we aspire to be or not to be like them, especially if they're in our family. I know I'm not alone as a woman in America feeling the impact of misogyny through generations, that this is common to women everywhere, but because Joan's story was lived so publicly, I can be that much more aware of what she went through and why, and it makes me want to focus on building a world that's less misogynistic and more empathetic. 

Karina: On that score, progress has been made. Today's Hollywood is different from the one that ex-communicated Joan Bennett after the shooting. 

Vanessa: I think we're now starting to be able to count on a baseline of empathy and a standard of equality in our culture and media. That's really important, yet even as there is wider acceptance of varied, sexual identities and types of relations. I think we still have a lot more progress to make on questions of adultery, which remains taboo and policed by men. Especially when a woman is the one perceived to be unfaithful or promiscuous. I find it surprising actually that it still is such a difficult subject. I think the old singular way of being a man in the world in my grandfather's day, a man with a gun without feelings who dominates discriminates and assumes superiority isn't working anymore. It never worked for the victims of this kind of toxic masculinity, and it's not working for men either. And I think that's becoming clear to men now, too. 

Karina: A nice way to end any story is with a song. Vanessa associates the last years of her grandmother's life with one song in particular. Joan's favorite song at the end of her life was "Send in the Clowns." Stephen Sondheim wrote, "Send in the Clowns" for his 1973 musical, "A Little Night Music", and it was performed in the 1977 film of the musical by Elizabeth Taylor.

Elizabeth Taylor: "But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns. Don't Bother- they're here."

Vanessa: It's considered one of the great bittersweet songs in which a middle-aged woman looks back at her. It feels perfectly fitting that this song would be song by Elizabeth Taylor in the movie version of "A Little Night Music" after all she had been through in her personal life. I think the song shows Joan's sense of humor about herself and her love life. 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. 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.

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. 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. Theme 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 also includes interviews with Susan Stryker, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Felix Werner, and a clip from season one, episode eight of for the series, "Transparent." And "Send in the Clowns," a song from the original motion picture soundtrack, "A Little Night Music" written by Stephen Sondheim and performed by Elizabeth Taylor. Fact checking by Laura Bullard. Special thanks to all of the performers who appeared on this season, including Zoe Deschanel, John Ham, Griffin Dunne, Mara Wilson, Adam Mortimer, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Noah Segan, Nate DiMeo, Bobby Finger, John August, Brian Comstock and Lili Anolik.