Authors: Michael Korda
On the coffee table was a large ice bucket containing six bottles of Pepsi and a full bottle of Stolichnaya vodka—Joan Crawford apparently remained loyal to the Pepsi-Cola company, or perhaps to Steele’s memory, despite everything. In each ashtray there was a full, carefully opened package of Pall Malls, with one cigarette sticking out exactly one inch, and a book of matches, folded back with one match sticking up. At various strategic locations, there were
un
opened packets of cigarettes and matchboxes, a reserve supply of Pepsi, and a generous supply of paper napkins. This, I was soon to discover, was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Joan Crawford’s need for order.
When she appeared, I was instantly won over, not only by the warmth of her greeting—most stars can pull that off when they need to—but by the fact that she was direct, cheerful, and very clearly a bundle of energy. She asked me what I wanted to drink, and I tactfully asked for vodka. She poured us two stiff ones and took the exposed cigarette from the nearest pack and lit it with the bent match.
The first thing she had to tell me was that she was not a prima donna, whatever anybody said. She had her faults, God knew, but she was a pro through and through. She had worked for the studios in the old days, when stars were expected to work their butts off and smile about it, and when you didn’t say no to any demand the publicity department might make, however damned tired you were after getting up at five in the morning to be in makeup at six, and even if you were hungover, or sick, or suffering from the goddamn cramps. She just wanted me to know that S&S could count on her to go out and sell the book, that was number one. She had put Pepsi-Cola on the map all over the world, after all, so she understood a little bit about publicity. As for the book, I should know that she had never been one of those actresses who fought directors. She took direction and was grateful for it. She just didn’t understand the new breed of actors and actresses, who went around looking like slobs and ignored their director on the set. Well, just look at Marilyn Monroe, for chrissake. In
her
day, Joan Crawford said
with a snort of contempt, Marilyn would never have gotten through the door, however much she wiggled her ass and put out on the studio couches. Marilyn just hadn’t been a professional, that was all, she had ignored directors, kept the whole cast waiting for hours because she was late, phoned in sick for every little sniffle. She, Joan, had told poor Marilyn, the director was God, that was all, and you did your best to do what he told you to—a strong director was your best friend. A lot of good it had done, sweet Jesus, in one ear and out the other.
I nodded. The feud between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford had been no secret. Crawford had complained that she had been upstaged by Monroe’s low-cut dress at some Hollywood function and remarked, rather too loudly, that
she
had tits too, but she didn’t let them hang out over her plate for everybody to see. Monroe, who greatly admired Crawford, heard about it and was crushed, or pretended to be, and most people in Hollywood took Monroe’s side, to Crawford’s dismay. As for strong directors, I thought, if she wanted to think of me as the publishing equivalent, so much the better, though I guessed that Joan—for we were instantly on a first-name basis—would be something of a handful, in fact.
Joan exuded movie-star charisma, despite her age, which was unfathomable. The famous eyes had not lost a bit of their sultry, intimidating glare; the face, though weathered, was still glamorous; and her figure would have been the envy of most women thirty years her junior. She still had great legs and knew it, but the eyes were her strongest features, as they always had been, at once imperious and deeply sad, so that it was possible to be frightened of her and feel sorry for her at the same time. She was small, not nearly as tall as I had expected, but she made up for it in sheer dynamism. Even sitting, sipping her vodka, she was in motion, fingers drumming, feet tapping, like a thoroughbred in its stall. Eventually, as if she couldn’t stand sitting for a moment longer, she stood up with the perfect grace and straight posture of the dancer she once had been and offered me a tour of the apartment.
I was not loath—this is, after all, an old form of Hollywood hospitality. The apartment, I instantly realized, was bigger than it had seemed to me at first, as if two adjoining apartments had been opened up into one. I admired Joan’s spotless kitchenette, her narrow terrace, a gleaming but not particularly luxurious or glamorous bathroom, a smallish bedroom, pretty much filled by a big bed and a television set, with a window that looked out over brownstone rooftops toward Blooming-dale’s.
Joan flung open a walk-in closet to reveal row after row of shoes. Each shoe had a shoe tree inserted into it, and all the shoe trees matched and bore tiny labels that identified the shoes they were in. Above them hung several rows of coats, most of them in plastic zipper bags. There were, needless to say, no wire coat hangers to be seen.
We walked through Joan’s dressing room into what must have been the living room of the next apartment. To my surprise, it contained countless pipe racks of clothes, arranged in neat rows. Each dress or suit was contained in a zippered transparent plastic bag, which was meticulously labeled. On the labels, Joan pointed out with pride, were recorded where she had bought the dress, the date and price of purchase, and all the significant occasions when she had worn it, together with the accessories that she had worn with it. There were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of dresses in the room, and more in what had been the bedroom of the next apartment. She had probably not worn some of them for decades. It was hard to work out her priorities. There was more room in the apartment for her clothes than for herself and she must have been paying a substantial amount of rent in order to house them. The walls were mostly bare, the furniture looked as if it belonged beside a pool, and the parquet floors were either bare or covered with cheap fiber matting. On the other hand, her hatboxes, each apparently specially made, took up enough room for a good-size family to live in.
We returned to the living room, having looked at every closet and storage space in the house, to talk about the book. What she wanted to do, she explained, was to give other women, perhaps less privileged than she, the benefit of her experience in managing a successful career and a busy family life. People admired her for her glamour and her energy, but they didn’t see the hard work that went into looking good or appearing upbeat and cheerful however you were really feeling inside. The book would have beauty hints, tips on how to dress, advice on how to keep a husband happy and entertain his boss, all of it interspersed with anecdotes from Joan’s own life.
I found it hard to see how the average woman was going to put Joan Crawford’s helpful hints to use in her own life—they included the right way to serve caviar and how to train your maid to pack your clothes so they don’t get wrinkled or crushed—but it is not in the nature of book publishers to harbor negative thoughts (the lifeblood of publishing is enthusiasm, after all, not caution), and in any case Joan, whatever her other talents, was a great saleswoman for her own cause. The great eyes
were mesmerizing, and even at her fairly advanced age she fairly radiated sex appeal. She was not then or ever an easy woman to say no to, as countless people before me had discovered.
She envisioned—as most celebrities do—a book with a lot of pictures of herself, a strong can-do attitude, and a solid core of useful information, a book that would not only be useful but would give her many faithful fans all over the world a glimpse of Joan Crawford’s world. “Your way of life?” I suggested, and her eyes went misty. That was it, exactly, she said, clutching my hand so hard that I feared she might actually break my fingers. Her book should be called
My Way of Life
, that was exactly the title she had been looking for without knowing it, and I had produced it out of thin air. She could tell that we were going to work well together and do great things. She was never wrong about that kind of thing. Did I like caviar? she asked me. I admitted that I liked it very much indeed, especially with vodka. She clapped her hands together happily. She wanted to know what people
liked—really
liked—then she would make sure they got it every time they visited her.
Mi casa, su casa
was her motto—I should feel at home here, always.
I extricated my hand, finished my vodka, and went home a convert. The very next day, I bought Joan’s book, despite Dan Green’s anguished prediction that she would be hell to tour.
Since Crawford’s apartment was on my way home from work, I took to dropping in from time to time to see how the book was going, and, true to her word, there was always caviar for me to have with my Stolichnaya. Every writer has his or her own method of working, of course, but Joan’s was singular and involved, as did much of her life, a certain unreality. She dictated her ideas into a dictating machine, and the tapes were then transcribed and rewritten by her ghostwriter and reappeared neatly typed up in a binder for Joan and me to go over. The only problem was that Joan resolutely denied the existence of the writer and insisted on treating every word of the typescript as if she had typed it herself, improbable as this was, given the perfection of her fingernails. This is not uncommon—lots of celebrities who want to have a book hire a ghostwriter but won’t admit to it—but Joan carried it to extremes. Quite often, the ghost was
there
, in the apartment, typing away, while Joan went on pretending that the apartment was empty apart from ourselves. While it’s not unusual to conceal the existence of a writer from the public (though I happen to think it’s usually a mistake to hide the fact), it’s almost unknown to hide it from one’s editor. When it comes
to their books, most authors have no secrets from their editor, who sees the manuscript, and very often the author, at its worst.
In fact, Joan’s book was an even more remarkable exercise in denial than are most autobiographical works. A whole section, for example, was devoted to her experience as a mother—admittedly this was before her daughter Christina turned herself into the poster girl for abusive motherhood and elevated the humble wire coat hanger into a symbol of parental cruelty, but even then the stories about Joan Crawford’s treatment of her adopted children were familiar. (Indeed, they had sometimes been used to make us movie brats of the forties mind our p’s and q’s.)
Joan, however, was rather proud of being a disciplinarian and boasted that she had made her children take a nap every day, even though they hated it as they grew older. Not many women noted with pride, as she did, that they made their children stand on a stool at the sink at the end of every day to “wash out their shoelaces and polish their little white shoes before putting them away.” Needless to say, the little white shoelaces had to be removed from the little white shoes first, then washed until they were spotless, laid flat so they dried unwrinkled, and put back into the shoes when they were dry in exactly the right pattern—
not
crisscrossed. Seen as a task for, say, a tired six-year-old, this seemed to me to approach cruelty, but Joan felt that she was merely giving her children the benefit of her own harsh upbringing and that it would make stronger persons of them. The children were taught to ignore any weakness and be perfect at all times. Although Cathy had an allergy to horses, she was made to take regular riding lessons, with her eyes streaming and her face swollen. “I was strict when I thought it was necessary” was all Joan could be made to say on the subject. She saw herself as the perfect mother, and that was that.
Her view of children was perhaps best defined by the paintings in her bedroom: Margaret Keane portraits of children, sorrowful waifs with huge, sad, dark eyes that seemed to follow one around the room. Her choice in art was at once mundane and bizarre—enough so to have caused a famous scene when the director Jean Negulesco criticized her “lousy taste” in art before the entire cast of
The Best of Everything
, sending Joan into a rare burst of tears. Pride of place in Joan’s living room was held by a large, three-quarter-length painting of herself wearing a clinging silver evening dress that left her shoulders bared and was cut so low in front that most of her breasts were revealed. It showed her, very oddly, with the face of a mature woman and the lush, nubile
figure of a nineteen-year-old
Playboy
centerfold. Was this the way she saw herself? If so—and it certainly seemed to be, for she was determined to put the painting on the cover of the book—it was another piece of self-delusion, like her notion of herself as a good mother, offering tips on child rearing to other women, or her belief that she had brought the children up in an ordinary happy family, despite her four marriages and the fact that the children were always being made to pretend, against the threat of dire punishment, that the current man in their mother’s life was their loving daddy.
In other ways, too, Joan’s manuscript came increasingly to represent what she had wanted her life to be and bore less and less resemblance to the truth—or, at any rate, to the known facts. She described in detail how hard she had to work to juggle “film offers,” despite the fact that she had not had such an offer in a very long time. She noted how hard-pressed she was to cope with the constant demands on her time by Pepsi-Cola, although the Pepsi people had been trying to get her off their backs ever since Steele’s death.
Her recipes for a happy marriage were equally strange, particularly as they came from somebody who had three divorces to her credit. She recommended a blood-sugar pick-me-up for husbands, served at drink time, consisting of peanut butter and bacon on black bread cooked in a grill until it sizzled. Her cooking—she was inordinately proud of her ability as a cook, though the only time she served me dinner she ordered in from Casserole Kitchen—was of a kind that might be construed as murder in the first degree: She favored cream soups, pork chops, pot roast, lobster Newburg, and, of course, caviar, a veritable cholesterol binge that perhaps went a long way to explaining Alfred Steele’s sudden death. To those of her women readers who couldn’t afford to serve caviar to their husbands, she advised skipping the hairdresser a couple of times or giving up a hat they didn’t really need. Nothing I could say convinced her that this advice was similar to Marie Antoinette’s remark on the subject of the breadless:
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!”