One of the most famous women in cinema hated her own name because it sounded like crawfish, and it had been chosen by a movie magazine contest. This episode deconstructs the self-made Joan Crawford: born Lucille LeSueur in Texas sometime between 1904 and 1908, abandoned by her father, injured leaping onto a broken milk bottle, working as a live-in servant to pay school tuition, dancing in chorus lines, and borrowing $400 to reach Hollywood on a $75-a-week MGM contract.

We follow her Charleston contests in Hollywood hotels to catch studio eyes, rivalry with Norma Shearer, the 1928 flapper breakthrough, retraining her voice with a dictionary for the talkies, the Depression-era pivot to shop girls and secretaries, Grand Hotel, the 1938 Box Office Poison ad, buying out her MGM contract, the screen test Michael Curtiz demanded for Mildred Pierce ...