Another Life

by Michael Korda

  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!”

  She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): “Any holdups today?” For those nights when the husband isn’t in, Joan recommended putting on a face mask of mayonnaise or pureed vegetables or a mixture of unflavored gelatin beaten with witch hazel, baking soda, and a raw egg. (At the last suggestion, Evelyn Gendel, the S&S editor who was going over the recipes for me, remarked, “She’s got to be kidding!”) But Joan took it all seriously, from brushing her hair one hundred strokes every night then pulling it hard (which she also did to her daughters until there were tears in their eyes) to teasing a husband out of his bad moods.

  Gradually, it dawned on me that Joan’s how-to book was in fact a kind of autobiography, not of the life she had lived but of life as she would like to have lived. All her marriages had been happy, her childhood, despite its up and downs, had been a happy one. Her children were perfect, happy, well adjusted, and loved her; Alfred Steele had been a kind of corporate Prince Charming (though photographs showed a plump, stolid man with an impatient expression, apparently eager to get away from whatever photo-op Joan created to show them as a happy couple). In short, in Dr. Pangloss’s words, “In this best of all possible worlds, all is for the best.” No blemish, however small, was allowed to tarnish this shining picture of perfection. My Way of Life was the equivalent of the kind of historical photographs that were once so common in the Soviet Union, in which all the faces were retouched and everyone who had failed to follow the party line had been carefully painted out.

  In some ways, it was as scary a book as I’ve ever read, and the scariest thing was that it worked. In the days before the Cosmo girl, Joan was defining that nebulous ideal of “total femininity,” the woman who knew how to be submissive to her husband, playful in bed, a terrific mother, and a busy, successful working woman. She could cook up a gourmet dinner for ten people at a moment’s notice (in case her hubby brought his board of directors home on a whim), clean spots off the white carpet with her own blend of ammonia and soap, pack the children off to bed happy and clean, study up on the subjects guaranteed to get the dinner party moving in case conversation faltered, clean up after dinner (nothing must ever be left to the next morning), slip into a fabulous negligee that caters to whatever his particular idea of “sexy” is, and get up the next morning to go to work and be a killer competitor. Joan Crawford had no patience at all with women who didn’t want to follow her example and, say, roll a Pepsi bottle around the floor under their instep to make their calves sexier for their husbands while reading the morning paper so as to have something to talk to him about when he comes home at night. Who but Joan Crawford would have instructed her readers to “get their shoulders back where God meant them to be,” or to say “yes” to themselves over and over again in front of the mirror for a more youthful, positive expression?

  Long before the book was complete, Joan’s mind had turned to promoting it. She even took me out to her favorite restaurant, “21,” to fill me in on her requirements for the tour, which were contained in a leather-bound loose-leaf binder in which each page was tucked neatly into a transparent plastic cover. This document was, Joan explained, to be “the Bible” for the people in the S&S publicity department who were organizing her tour. It was written in the third person, in an imperious tone of voice, with the more important points underlined. Miss Crawford, I read, must always have a black limousine (not a sedan). The chauffeur must wear a black uniform. He must not smoke in the car or talk to Miss Crawford. I read on. Miss Crawford must have a suite in each hotel along the way. The exact temperature of the suite was specified. The suite was to be provided with the same array of Pepsis and Stolichnaya vodka as she had at home, as well as the exact same placement of cigarette packets and matchbooks. There were to be flowers in each room, in pastel colors (No white flowers!). The refrigerator in the suite was to be stocked with fresh, unopened packets of Ry-Krisps and melba toast, plain cottage cheese, raw carrots and celery sliced lengthwise, on ice. There was to be an ironing board and a steam iron in the suite for the use of Miss Crawford’s faithful German maid (whom she always called, strangely enough, “Mamacita”), and a full hour must be provided before departure to ensure that Miss Crawford’s trunks and hatboxes were downstairs in time and packed into a second vehicle. The hotel manager or assistant manager must be in the lobby to greet Miss Crawford and take her straight to her suite, so she didn’t have to check in.

  As the tour began, Joan Crawford of legend reappeared, effacing the image she had created for herself of the calmly efficient, reasonable career woman. She became, to the horror of everybody directly involved in her tour, a star again, in the full meaning of the word.

  That, perhaps, was the reason why she wrote the book in the first place, it now occurs to me.

  Not long after Joan departed for the hinterlands to sell her book, my wife and I were woken out of a deep sleep late at night by the telephone.

  I lifted the receiver and heard the familiar voice of Joan Crawford but raised in decibels to the level of a Boeing 707 leaving the runway. It was, by a strange coincidence, exactly the same level of anger and barely controlled hysteria that I was to hear many years later when I took a call from an unhappy Faye Dunaway, who actually played an angry Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest and got the wire-hanger scene exactly right. “I’m in Cleveland,” Joan howled. “And there are white flowers in my room!”

  I’m not sure how I managed to get the situation straightened out. I think I called the night manager and had him replace Joan’s flowers with others. Somehow I got Joan calmed down enough so that she could at least hear my apology, but the truth was that I had been badly shaken. Joan’s voice was the very distillation of female rage.

  Years later, I happened to mention Joan’s horror of white flowers to my Auntie Merle. She nodded, as if it made perfect sense. “In Hollywood, white flowers are for funerals,” she said crisply. “Joan knew that better than anyone.”

  I told her of Joan’s late-nig
ht telephone call to me, and Merle laughed. “Rage was what she did best, that’s all, darling—her specialty, like Fred Astaire’s dancing or Jimmy Stewart’s shyness. You’re lucky to have heard it.”

  And I suppose I am.

  ONE WRITER who had not followed Gottlieb to Knopf was S. J. Perelman, the sharp-tongued star humorist of The New Yorker, whom I had first met when he was hired by Mike Todd to write the script for Around the World in Eighty Days, for which my father did a good part of the art direction. Like most humorists, Perelman was a misanthropic and embittered man at heart, suspicious, jealous, touchy, and quick to take offense. But he was just about the only writer I know whose manuscripts made me laugh out loud uncontrollably. In person, he was a curious blend of Savile Row and Moskowitz and Lupowitz, a stylishly dressed figure, just short of being a full-fledged dandy, with a rakish little military mustache and steel-rimmed glasses with tiny lenses that made his eyes look like those of the little bon vivant who used to be Esquire magazine’s trademark. The eyes were prominent, piercing, and showed no trace of good humor. The old Hollywood adage “Dress British, think Yiddish” might have been coined with Perelman in mind—might even have been coined by him, now that I think of it. He walked around New York in spiffy tweeds, a jaunty green hat, a loden cape, and handmade brogues, as if he were deer stalking in the Scottish Highlands. His home life—not that he ever discussed it—was reputed to be tragic. His wife, Laura, the sister of Nathanael West, was an alcoholic; his son was hostile; like most of the long-term New Yorker writers, he nursed endless grievances and feuds against other members of that narrow and all too often uncharmed circle. In short, he was not a happy man. Perelman took his writing more seriously than his public did, and he yearned to have his work celebrated as literature. He was not consoled when the reviewers merely praised him to the skies for being funny, and therefore he bore a grudge against even the best and most generous of reviewers. He was not pleased by his sales, either. He wanted to be a major bestseller, on the scale of Harold Robbins, but while his sales were respectable, they remained comparatively small, partly because most of his books were collections and most of his fans had already read the pieces in The New Yorker. He had left Random House after many years, out of disgust for his low sales, and was beginning to feel the same way about S&S. Low sales were not the only bone he had to pick with Random House. Bennett Cerf fancied himself a humorist and a punster and was the author of numerous collections of jokes. He was a fervent Perelman fan, but on some deep level he was also a competitor, determined to prove that he was funnier than his own author. Perelman’s sense of humor did not extend to other people’s jokes—in any case, what he wanted to hear from Cerf was glowing reports of sales, not jokes—and the relationship between the two men was inevitably frayed.