Possessed (40 page)

The Story of Esther Costello
offered a pair of unusual performances—by twenty-one-year-old Heather Sears, entirely convincing as a girl deprived of her senses; and by Joan, who conveyed maternal love, womanly passion and moral outrage with the most economical dramatic technique. She and Sears also spent months learning sign language. “It was one hell of a demanding role,” Joan recalled, “and I played it in my own pitch, the way I thought it should be played, and I was right. The complexities of the part were staggering … [and I] have nothing but very fond memories of it—plus the usual nagging question, why the hell didn’t more pictures like this come along? Why did I [subsequently] get stuck in freak shows?” The answer had to do with the limited possibilities for leading ladies of a certain age and the increasing scarcity of literate screenplays.

“Joan Crawford is a star whose thirty-year career has recently bogged down in bad pictures,” wrote the reviewer for
Time.
“But she can still turn in a creditable performance—and what’s more, is still pretty darn good-looking,too.” Alas, this was, as Joan said, her last really good movie, and there was a two-year interval between the release of this picture and her next.

FOR MOST OF 1957,
Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Steele were on the road for Pepsi-Cola, traveling across the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Europe and Africa. At each stop, Joan delighted the public as if the event were a movie premiere: she accepted bouquets of flowers, gave a carefully prepared little speech, signed autographs and posed for photographs. The questions put to her by waiting reporters were vetted in advance; her hair, makeup and wardrobe were always perfect for the location; her jewels sparkled; and she never failed to smile cooperatively for every cameraman. “We found that there was a certain mystique in having Joan Crawford coming along,” she said later. “People, especially the salesmen, were impressed, and that was important to Alfred and to the company.”

Her schedule for that year listed over 175 interviews for newspapers and magazines and 160 for radio and television. In addition, there were diplomatic receptions, dinners for businessmen and dignitaries and side trips to places of cultural importance. Joan was indeed a movie queen, and her world travels were planned very much like those of visiting royals. The work was hard and the hours long, but Joan Crawford Steele unfailingly transformed mere duties into glamorous occasions. “It seemed natural to me to be part of the company’s executive staff. I liked the product, Alfred’s way of doing business, and the other executives and sales and promotion people I met. I could communicate fairly well with their wives and with important customers, here and abroad. I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t gone into films so early in life, I’d have found some role in business—I took to it so naturally.”

On their return in early 1958, the duplex on Fifth Avenue was at last ready for occupancy, and they moved from Sutton Place South to 2 East Seventieth Street. The new apartment was almost entirely white, with low sofas and tables, and side chairs in pale green and yellow. The master suite had a large fountain, enormous walk-in closets and one of the apartment’s twowood-burning fireplaces. Throughout, there was white carpeting, kept pristine by Joan’s insistence that all visitors remove their shoes at the door.

Not long after the final pieces of furniture were in place, Joan began rehearsals for a half-hour television drama called “Strange Witness,” an episode of the
General Electric Theater,
broadcast on March 23 and repeated throughout the year. The producers cast her as a middle-aged woman, married to a much older man and enjoying the company of a young lover. To free them both and gain the older man’s fortune, the young man kills the husband. Perhaps not to the television audience’s surprise, the crime does not pay.
⁴

It did not in life, either. The previous year, Christopher had run away from a school he had chosen in Arizona. Now, at fifteen, his troubles with the law worsened. On May 10, he ran away from the home of Dr. Earl Loomis, a Long Island psychiatrist with whose family he had agreed to live. The following day, Christopher was charged with malicious mischief after “borrowing” a car and speeding recklessly through the town of Greenport, breaking store windows and streetlights with an air rifle and wounding a teenage pedestrian before police tracked him down. At Joan and Alfred’s request, a judge then ordered that Christopher be sent to a school for delinquent and disturbed adolescents.

At seventeen, he was arrested for car theft and was sentenced to a correctional institution. By the age of nineteen, he was working as a lifeguard in Florida, where he married a waitress, fathered three children—and (in his own words) “had no idea” where the family was after he obtained a hasty divorce. He then married a second time and returned to Long Island. He never held down any job for very long, and his second wife worked as an office clerk to support him and their daughter. Christopher Crawford died at the age of sixty-three, on September 22, 2006. “My son was one of the few problems inthis world that I couldn’t solve,” Joan said. “Alfred started out thinking I had been too strict a disciplinarian with him, but he ended up thinking I hadn’t been half strict enough.”

In August 1958, while the Steeles were taking a brief holiday in Bermuda, Anna Le Sueur died in Los Angeles; she was seventy-four and succumbed following a series of strokes. Joan and Alfred hurried to California for her mother’s funeral and burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park on Monday, August 18. Joan wept bitterly—"for the utter waste,” as she told a friend, “and for what might have been between us, more than for anything else. My mother wanted what I could do for her, but I don’t think she ever really wanted to be part of my life. I know everyone thought it was the other way around, but I honestly tried.”

THE LOSSES IN HER
life reached critical mass during the night of April 18–19, 1959, when Alfred Steele died suddenly of a massive heart attack in their new apartment. He was five days short of his fifty-eighth birthday, and their fourth wedding anniversary would have been marked the following month. Joan had noticed over the previous few days that he seemed unusually tired—"subdued as I had never seen him"—even to the point of profound exhaustion.

With Douglas Fairbanks Jr., as Joan said, she had tried too hard to make the marriage work. With Franchot Tone and Phillip Terry, on the other hand, she admitted that she had not tried hard enough. “I needn’t have let my career dominate me as much as I did. I was an established star—I didn’t have to work as hard as I did, and I needn’t have spent so much time on the image thing.” But with Alfred, “I didn’t have to try anything at all—everything worked out all by itself, as though it was meant to be. Every minute with him I was
alive.
For the first time in my life, I was really
alive”
In 1963 Joan told a writer, “I know how lucky I was for the four years of my marriage to Alfred. Not many women have been that lucky. I remember only the beauties of our marriage, and not the sadness of his departing.” Douglas, Franchot and Phillip were the first three to put through condolence telephone calls.

Two days after Alfred’s death and the day before the funeral at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Joan received a condolence call from Herbert L. Barnet, the new chief executive officer of Pepsi-Cola. He arrived at the apartment not only to offer the company’s sympathy but also to inform her that—"if you would kindly accept it"—the executive directors had unanimously voted to appoint her to the board of Pepsi-Cola. She accepted on the spot.

Joan’s appointment was, as Barnet told the press, “not merely a sentimental gesture to the memory of Alfred Steele, but a hard-headed business judgment which makes possible the continuing utilization by Pepsi-Cola of Miss Crawford’s intimate knowledge and rare skills in promotion and public relations, which she has so superbly demonstrated to our benefit for the last four years.” For her ongoing service, Joan was to receive sixty thousand dollars annually to cover her travel, secretarial and personal expenses while representing Pepsi. “I plan to be a working member of the Board,” she told a reporter, “to carry on where we left off and to keep the company growing.”

ANOTHER CALL SOON CAME
—from Jerry Wald, the producer of six earlier Joan Crawford pictures. He had gone over from Warner Bros. to Twentieth Century-Fox and was about to begin a new picture to be directed by Jean Negulesco, who had worked so well with Joan on
Humoresque.
There was a small but effective supporting role for Joan in a picture called
The Best of Everything,
and Wald offered her sixty-five thousand dollars for a few days’ work. “I thought that coming out to Hollywood and working would take her mind off her troubles and be good therapy for her,” Wald told a reporter. As he and Barnet demonstrated beyond dispute, Joan had friends and admirers who were willing to back up their good faith and their good sense with good money.

The two offers could not have come at a better time, for within weeks of Alfred’s death, Joan was informed by lawyers that his estate was, to put it bluntly, in one big, chaotic mess. She had understandably but wrongly presumed that shrewd financial management was part of his keen business sense and that she would have no worries in the event of his death.

But she had woefully miscalculated. During the four years of the marriage, Alfred had borrowed huge sums from Pepsi-Cola to pay for their lavish lifestyle. And after the purchase, renovation and redecoration of the duplex, he had nothing to leave but debts, including an enormous tax burden Joan was now obliged to pay. To make matters worse, the proceeds that Joan had given him from the sale of her Brentwood home (purchased by Donald O’Connor) had somehow vanished.

Joan’s longtime publicist, John Springer, was a kind and perceptive man, and he knew the situation intimately.

“No matter what others might say, Joan and Alfred had a good marriage,” Springer said in 1991. “I don’t think it was the kind of grand passion she had earlier with Doug or Clark or Franchot, but he was a good companion to her, and when he died, she was really broken up. They both spent a lot of money buying presents for one another and for the children, taking vacations and redoing the whole apartment. Of course it also cost much more to renovate than they had planned, and then he did something I thought was very foolish—he borrowed money from Pepsi against his future salary, and that had to be repaid. But even after she learned about her terrible financial status, she never had a bad word to say about Alfred.”

The estate of Alfred Steele was still in probate seven years after his death, and as detailed investigations continued, the situation seemed increasingly bizarre. Besides Joan’s income from her sale of the Brentwood house in 1957, he had accepted her salaries from her television work and the cash from life insurance policies she redeemed.

And so Joan sat down and planned a schedule of repayments for all the money her husband had borrowed from Pepsi-Cola as well as the tax debt claimed by the government. Because the sums far exceeded $1 million, she had another reason to continue working, both on the board of directors and in Hollywood. “What I would have done without Pepsi-Cola, I do not know. I just wanted to work and work, to be so tired that when I fell into bed, Icouldn’t think—and I could just sleep.” Joan bore her sorrow alone; she never assumed the role of a grieving widow, and she never asked for sympathy. She simply went back to work. “I have turned to work again and again over the years as an antidote to the pains of life. Work is the best alleviator of sorrow I know, and once again, it is standing me in good stead. So I will work—and cry on my own time.”

ON JUNE 1, JOAN
arrived on Stage 15 at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios in Los Angeles to begin filming her supporting role in
The Best of Everything
—her return to movie work after a four-year interval. Based on a best-selling novel by Rona Jaffe that Wald had essentially commissioned, the picture was planned as a breathless tale of three young women—played in the movie by Hope Lange, Diane Baker and Suzy Parker—who come from the provinces to New York looking for love, money, success or what-you-will while they work at a Manhattan publishing company. All three actresses were under contract to Fox: Lange had just come from
Peyton Place;
Baker was critically acclaimed for her role as Anne’s older sister in
The Diary of Anne Frank;
and Parker had launched an acting career after several years as one of America’s first supermodels.

Joan’s role was that of Amanda Farrow, a foul-tempered middle-aged editor who has sacrificed personal happiness for professional glory and so creates misery for everyone around her; she was, in other words, Jenny Stewart from
Torch Song,
transplanted from the theater to an office. But like that role, it was dreadfully underwritten: without enough backstory to make the character credible or even comprehensible, Amanda is just another spiteful, unpleasant shrew.

When Joan arrived at Fox, it was clear that widowhood had not softened her. A limousine transported her to the studio, where she swept in, accompanied as always by her hairdresser, makeup artist, wardrobe mistress, secretary and stand-in. Cast and crew had been instructed not to address her until she greeted them first, and they had been warned that Miss Crawford asked for the air-conditioning to be set six degrees lower than what was customary.

“That was my first experience of star power,” recalled Diane Baker. “She had to have the set almost freezing, and many people caught colds. We tried to figure out why she demanded this, and someone came up with the answer—it had to do with her makeup.”

Each of the three leading ladies was young enough to be Joan’s daughter: Lange was twenty-eight, Parker twenty-seven and Baker twenty-one, and they were, at first, duly awestruck, but that helped their scenes with the formidable character Joan portrayed. “I was fortunate that there was this tension with her,” Lange recalled. “Our scenes were built with tension, and there it was, even before the camera rolled. It had to have been tough for her, to have these three young upstarts—and there she was, in a nonstarring role.”