Harold “Junior” Cook of Birmingham once adored golden age film star Joan Crawford, even though she died in 1977, just five years after Cook was born.
A hair stylist at Salon on Crescent, Cook was especially captivated by the young Joan Crawford. “I thought, ‘Wow, she was absolutely beautiful,’” he tells Weld Local. “I just loved the way she looked, and that’s the way it started off.”
Birmingham hair stylist Harold Cook once loved movie star Joan Crawford, perhaps a bit too much.
Unfortunately, what started for Cook was an obsession with the star, an obsession which led him to spend thousands of dollars on Crawford items, including books, photos, lobby cards and vintage movie magazines.
Now Cook is leaving Crawford behind, along with, he says, the psychological baggage she represents. And he is purging himself of his Crawford memorabilia. He is selling it over the next few months, both on eBay and in a special display at Urban Suburban Antiques in Crestwood.
His fascination with Crawford began, Cook said, when he saw the 1981 Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest, starring Faye Dunaway. “I just remember loving that movie,” he says. One thing he liked was the ballsy actress he saw portrayed in the film. “I liked her strength,” he says. “I liked her determination. I liked her ruthlessness.”
This was consistent with the way Cook viewed women. “I guess I’ve always been drawn to women that are powerful, because I always felt that they were the underdog,” he says. “You know, women have always been put second to men, and they’ve always had to strive and work harder, and for somebody like her to stay on top from the time she got into the business until she died. I mean, that’s phenomenal.”
Cook began collecting Crawford memorabilia in about 2005, when he visited Los Angeles with his boyfriend at the time, who, he says, “was really into old Hollywood.” Cook bought some old photographs of Crawford at a shop on Hollywood Blvd. “That’s where that addiction really started for me,” according to Cook, who was already a pop-culture collector, having avidly accumulated Barbie dolls since the mid 1990s.
Cook wanted to have Barbie dolls when he was a little boy but was not allowed, which only whetted his appetite. “When I was little, my mom would let me play with Ken,” he says. “She… even bought me Shaving Ken, and I would play with my cousins and stuff like that. But she would never let me have Barbie, so I said, ‘You know what? Fuck you. I’m going to get a whole fucking room of them.’ And I have a whole tucking room of them right now that I’m trying to sell.”
Why did Cook get so hung up on Crawford? “I was miserable in the relationship I was in,” he says. “I was miserable in my life. I didn’t realize it, but I was using her as something to focus on, something to lose myself in and not deal with anybody in the world, but I liked her because she was glamorous. I liked it because she was a man-eater. I liked it because she… got things done. When somebody kicked her out, she found her way back to the top.”
Cook’s purchases of Crawford items—a campy poster for the film Harriet Craig, for example, or a lobby card for the film Mildred Pierce—were made all too easy by his regular visits to Web shopping site eBay, which, he says, “is so addictive.” Cook would get “the whole fix of getting something in the mail,” he says, adding, “I thought I had to collect every cover of every magazine she was on and every poster.”
Earlier this year, Cook realized that it was time for him to make a change in his life. One factor was Cook’s dissatisfaction with the guy he was dating (not the fan of old Hollywood with whom he visited Los Angeles; that relationship ended in about 2007).
“I felt that I had finally met my match,” Cook says. “I felt like this person was really showing me a side of me that I didn’t want to see. It was like looking into a mirror.”
According to Cook, his boyfriend was in touch with his more ruthless feminine side in the same way that Cook had long been–partly under Crawford’s influence, as he would come to learn.
Another factor that led Cook to reassess his relationship to Joan Crawford was, on the surface, rather mundane—his need to have the hallway in his house repainted.
“I mean, my whole hallway in my house was just Joan Crawford across the wall,” he says. “That’s the only room I allowed her in. But it was like this huge [display]. I remember I took everything down, and I painted that hallway, and it looked so clean and fresh, and I did that right before I got out of that relationship, because I knew mentally that relationship was over, and I knew I needed some kind of change in my life, and I had packed away everything else of Joan’s that I had bought in this one closet, and I didn’t even realize how much crap I had.”
Life coach Albert Gaulden told Cook to burn all of his Joan Crawford memorabilia.
Perhaps the biggest impetus for change in Cook’s life, particularly his status as a Crawford collector, came in early June, when Cook had an astrology reading over the phone with Albert Gaulden, an author, therapist and life coach in Sedona, Ariz. Cook made the call on a Monday, after breaking up with his boyfriend the previous weekend.
“[Gaulden] said so much stuff to me that blew my mind,” Cook says. “He told me about how my addictions have been driving me. My female side has been driving me. He just started naming off stuff about me. That was what blew my mind. He started naming off stuff about me that I knew was true. And I was like, ‘Wow. How does he know this?’ And he was like, ‘You really need to come out here.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t do that.’ And then I read his book, and I thought this is really who I am.
Gaulden’s book, titled You’re Not Who You Think You Are, sufficiently impressed Cook that he decided to visit Sedona for private sessions.
Gaulden was not the first therapist Cook had visited through the years, but he had a take-no-prisoners style that got his new client’s attention. “He uses the whole 12-step program but he goes at it in a different way,” Cook says. “I don’t know what it is, but he really… gets up in your face and calls you out on your shit, and I needed that so bad.”
According to Cook, “Mr. Albert” (as he calls Gaulden) told him that we all have male and female sides to our personalities, and that Cook—through his identification with Crawford—had allowed his feminine side to dominate him. “I realized my female side was a lot like [Crawford],” Cook says. “She was ruthless, and she would do whatever it took to get whatever she wanted… and I knew that was not who I was and who I wanted to be.”
Gaulden urged his new client to burn all of his Joan Crawford memorabilia, but Cook balked at this radical remedy, since he had spent about $3,000 on the collection and wanted to try to recover some of his money. Gaulden, he says, suggested that he set up a booth with a TV monitor playing Crawford’s films and do a big sale.
Cook is much happier now, he says, especially since beginning to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly, also at Gaulden’s insistence. “I am more clean and clear now,” Cook says. “I am more outgoing. I like to meet more people. I don’t lock myself up and… obsess over stuff like this, like Joan Crawford and Barbie. The person before was selfish, lied, would do whatever it took to do whatever they needed, and today, I know I have to get out of myself and do stuff for other people.”
Jesse Chambers is a contributing editor at Weld for Birmingham and contributing writer at B-Metro magazine. Send your feedback to editor@weldbham.com.
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