Possessed (38 page)

Queen Bee,
which lost the definite article as it moved from page to screen, was made to order for Joan at this time in her life. She paid Edna Lee fifteen thousand dollars for the movie rights, which she then sold to Columbia Pictures on several conditions: Jerry Wald was to produce; Ranald MacDougall was to be both writer and director; for her cameraman, she chose Charles Lang, who had done her bidding on
Sudden Fear
and
Female on the Beach;
and she had contractual approval on her costume, hair and makeup designers. These negotiations were finalized at the end of October 1954, just when she was seen in her second television drama, as a woman on
The Road to Edinburgh
who offers a ride to a man who fixes her flat tire and who may or may not be a killer.

Joan’s schedule called for her to complete
Female on the Beach
in February 1955 and to follow that at once with
Queen Bee.
Betsy Palmer, also in the cast of
Queen Bee,
recalled that the erotic high jinks of Joan Crawford and her costar John Ireland often led to their late and disheveled arrival on the set. In his unpublished autobiography, Ireland detailed the brief affair, their “repeated dinners at Frascati’s Restaurant … and whatever else we repeated never seemed repetitious, it was always like a first time. She was exotic beyond the meaning of the word.”

On New Year’s Eve, in her dressing room on the Universal soundstage, Joan was reading her script and sipping a drink when a call was patched through from home. On the line was Earl Blackwell, a celebrity promoter who preferred to be known as a society impresario; he was calling from Las Vegas with a group of friends at his side to extend greetings to Joan. The revelers included

Alfred and Lillian Steele, whom Joan had met a few times at New York parties and charity events. Joan told the Steeles that she hoped they would soon visit her in Los Angeles. And that, she thought, was the end of that.

Queen Bee
was completed in late April 1955. “I had a chance to play the total bitch, a worse bitch than I had played in
The Women
—and for a solid ninety minutes, too. I ended up hating myself, honestly feeling that in my death scene I was getting precisely what I deserved.” Audiences found the southern gothic hysterics impossible to like, but her fans found it impossible to avoid—it was rather like a roadside accident that demands horrified attention. Joan played the part of Eva Phillips as written—"with such silky villainy that we long to see her dispatched,” as one critic wrote. “When she is killed at the end, as she should be, it is a genuine pleasure and relief”

SOON THERE WAS
A regular visitor to the set of
Queen Bee,
and before long, the cast sensed that love was blossoming in the star’s dressing room. The gentleman was not John Ireland.

Alfred Nu Steele, who visited without his wife, was five years older than Joan.
⁴
Born on April 24, 1901, in Nashville, Tennessee, he was a graduate of Chicago’s Northwestern University, where he played football. Steele began his career in the advertising department of the
Chicago Tribune
and then worked in advertising for Standard Oil and the Columbia Broadcasting System. With the D’Arcy Advertising Agency, he managed the Coca-Cola account, which subsequently hired him as marketing director. In 1949 Pepsi-Cola took him on, and by 1950 he was their chief executive officer and chairman of the board; he was made a president in 1951.

Regarded as gregarious, ambitious and socially agreeable, Steele compensated for merely average looks with above-average charm. Rugged but stylish, he had learned a great deal from his world travels for Pepsi, and he was indemand as an amusing raconteur. He also loved being the star at an event and was fascinated by celebrities. At fifty-four, he was full of energy and plans: he loved his job and lived for it, as Joan soon realized. During his first visit, they dined together on three successive evenings. Money seemed of little concern to him; indeed, some colleagues considered his methods rather too “flashy,” and his private financial dealings, according to one investigative reporter, “were not [in the language of the day] always according to Hoyle"—which meant there were often questions about both his debt level and his timely payment of personal invoices.

Steele had already put in motion a variety of measures to improve the fortunes of Pepsi-Cola. He reorganized the management, launched a new advertising campaign and authorized a change in the formula of the drink to make it less sweet. On taking charge, he also concentrated on reviving the morale of Pepsi-Cola’s independent workers. Usually local businessmen, the bottlers had been prone to selling out because of dissatisfaction with stagnating sales in the late 1940s. As business improved in the 1950s, Steele still regarded them as problems, because, in his opinion, they were inclined to become complacent and lazy in good times. Accordingly, Steele bought the franchises of several bottlers who were not getting good results in major markets, and he assumed operation of these territories directly. Soon, Pepsi-Cola was its own bottler in over twenty major American markets and in a growing number of Third World countries.

Joan quickly learned a great deal about the man and his business, and she found everything fascinating. Through mutual friends, she had heard rumors that Alfred’s second marriage was soon to be dissolved, which he confirmed a few weeks later, when he returned to Los Angeles. By this time, the divorce of the Steeles was in progress. (His first wife was Marjorie Garvey, the mother of his daughter, Sally; his second marriage, to Lillian Nelson, produced a son named Alfred Nelson Steele.)

Things happened with extraordinary speed after Alfred announced to Joan that he was going to marry her. “There was never a question in his mind or mine that I was going to be his wife. The chemistry was right—and beyondchemistry, a breathtaking premonition of new horizons.”
Premonition
may not have been the word she meant to use, but there it was—a warning, conjoined to the excitement of anticipating “new horizons.”

Alfred Steele took pride in being a man who took charge, however occasionally unpopular his corporate pronouncements or business decisions might be. On his side, he was certainly attracted to this passionate and energetic movie star, but he also must have appreciated the value of marrying one of the world’s most celebrated and glamorous women. They agreed that she would not have to abandon her acting career unless and until she wished to do so—but meanwhile, as she said, she could certainly help to market and endorse Pepsi-Cola.

For her part, Joan found the idea of becoming Mrs. Alfred Steele surprisingly appealing. There had been no absence of lovers since her divorce from Philip Terry in 1946, but none of them had been serious prospects for marriage. “I was unutterably lonely,” she told a friend, an admission that goes a long way toward explaining the procession of sexual partners. “I was unfulfilled. I am a woman with a woman’s need—a husband.”

By the end of 1954, Christina was defiant and Christopher was frighteningly out of control. Would they not benefit from the presence of a strong, loving man with two children who clearly adored him? Joan’s four children liked Steele, and Christina, especially, formed a good relationship with the man she henceforth called her father. “The first meeting was strange and awkward,” Christina told a reporter. “Yet I had the immediate feeling that he was tremendously kind. I have never felt such warmth, strength and understanding in any person. He was my idea of what a father should be.”

Gloria Swanson may well have come to Joan’s mind once again: she, too, had mostly abandoned acting for a new career as a successful business entrepreneur. Joan did not think of herself in that capacity yet, but she soon began to ask questions about the basics of marketing and corporate strategies. In addition, Alfred Steele was evidently a man of considerable wealth, and Joan was now living from season to season with fewer offers of movie jobs and more expenses for the growing children. There was no reason for them not to marry.

This they did two weeks ahead of the planned date. While dining in Beverly Hills on the evening of May 9, 1955, Alfred suggested that they advance the occasion and leave at once for Las Vegas in the Pepsi-Cola corporate airplane. Protesting that she had not been in a plane since the bumpy ride from Catalina after filming
Rain
in 1932, Joan insisted she would not travel except by train or car. Nonsense, said Steele: she would have nothing to fear so long as he was with her. And with that, he poured her a stiff drink, took her by the arm and rushed her to the waiting airplane. At two o’clock on the morning of May 10, 1955, at the Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas Municipal Judge Ben Mendoza pronounced them man and wife. Three of Alfred’s friends witnessed the event.

The newlyweds departed at the end of June from New York on the SS
United States
for a European honeymoon. “We were madly in love,” Joan recalled, “but we were also a strong, mature man and woman, each used to his own way and not about to relinquish it. Alfred had evidently been warned by countless associates that a movie star is self-centered and just naturally annihilates men—that he’d have to subdue me and show me from the beginning who was boss. This I was not prepared for. He’d been a persuasive wooer and a passionate bridegroom, and now I met a streak of bull-headed obstinacy that frightened me. I had longed all my life for a strong lover, but I wouldn’t be bullied.” The trip was fine, but she was glad to return home—and to work. “I had a lot of suffering to do in my next picture,” she said. “But it was easy. In real life, I was suffering over the uneasiness of my marriage.”

1
There were four Oscar nominations for the picture: Joan, for best actress; Charles Lang, for best black-and-white cinematography; Sheila O’Brien, for best costume design; and Jack Palance, for best supporting actor. But none of the nominees took home a statuette. (Shirley Booth won the best actress Academy Award, for her role in Come Back, Little Sheba.)

2
By 1953, Christina and Christopher were boarding at the Chadwick School, where eventually the twins would join them.

3
As of 2010, the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio, with branches in New York and Los Angeles) listed in its archives three extant television dramas starring Joan Crawford: “Rebel Range,” an episode of Zane Grey Theatre (December 3, 1959); “The Five Daughters Affair,” a two-part installment of The Man From U.N.C.L.E (March 31 and April 7, 1967); and “Eyes,” from Night Gallery (November 7, 1969).

4
According to biographer Bob Thomas, Steele’s father assigned the middle name in honor of the national Sigma Nu fraternity, to which Edgar Steele had been devoted.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Some of the Best of Everything
| 1955–1962 |

I
T WAS SHEER hell,
” Joan Crawford said later, speaking frankly about the first year of her marriage to Alfred Steele. “But that was only because we were getting used to each other’s lives, making adjustments. Alfred lived at a very fast pace, keeping appointments on the split second. Sometimes I couldn’t keep up, and it embarrassed me. But I did what I could,” and in fact the occasional dissensions were outnumbered by the long periods of mutual, intense happiness. “We were very much in love. Everybody warned him it wouldn’t last—'You’re marrying one tough broad!'—but he knew my toughness was an act.” Part of that toughness came from Joan’s compulsive need to maintain her image as a star, which she now had to transform and reinvent as the full-time wife of a business executive.

There was no question about where the newlyweds would live. Joan soon sold her home in Los Angeles and moved into his New York residence, at 36 Sutton Place South. The address, on a quiet, tree-lined block near the East River, was impressive—but the dimensions of the two-bedroom apartment were not, and soon the Steeles required a larger space for business entertainingand larger rooms for Joan’s wardrobe. In 1956 Alfred bought an eighteen-room duplex penthouse at 2 East Seventieth Street, at Fifth Avenue; most of the rooms overlooked Central Park. They decided to turn the residence into eight enormous rooms, and that required considerable architectural renovation and, with the help of William Haines, complete redecoration.

The purchase and reconstruction required an outlay of over one million dollars, a sum that Steele borrowed from the Pepsi-Cola Company. During the two years of renovations, the couple lived alternately at Sutton Place South and, when entertaining, in suites at the Hampshire House hotel. Oblivious to costs, Alfred Steele spent money extravagantly—in fact, with a kind of wild abandon.

Joan, who had recently been paid about fifty thousand dollars per picture, had heavy school expenses for the children and was in the 90 percent tax bracket; she had, therefore, no vast sums to bring to her marriage. Nevertheless, she turned over to Alfred the proceeds from the sale of 426 North Bristol Avenue, and something else that he considered just as valuable as money: her drawing power as an international celebrity. Unlike Joan’s previous three husbands, he was not an actor—hence there was no competition, no contest of professional wills, and no concern about uncertain salaries or suspensions. From the start, Alfred impressed Joan as very much his own man, with a secure self-awareness and proud accomplishments in a business of which she knew nothing. But there was an important place for her in his world—not only as the celebrity on his arm as they traveled the globe, but also as a woman with remarkable energy who quickly became the best exponent of public relations in the history of Pepsi-Cola. Joan knew how to meet people, how to handle crowds, how to be endlessly gracious with strangers and how to field questions from reporters.