Possessed (44 page)

Miss Crawford will be met in an air-conditioned, chauffeur-driven, newly cleaned Cadillac limousine. Instruct your chauffeurs that they are not to smoke and that they may not at any time drive in excess of 40 miles an hour with Miss Crawford in the car.

Miss Crawford will be carrying a minimum of 15 pieces of luggage. Along with the limousine you will meet Miss Crawford’s plane with a closed van for the luggage. Have with you a luggage handler who can accompany the van back to the hotel. It will be his task to take an inventory of the luggage as it comes off the plane and into the van, and as it is being brought into Miss Crawford’s suite. There will be a few small items which will go with Miss Crawford in the limousine. Mr. Kelly will supervise this particular part of the operation. Luggage trucks to follow limousine and remain within sight of the limousine.

Every precaution should be taken to assure that none of the luggage is misplaced. Fifteen pieces is the estimated minimum. There may be considerably more and it will be possible for confusion to result. Anticipate this problem and be absolutely certain that a careful inventory of all luggage is maintained at all times during the arrival and departure.

Miss Crawford is a star in every sense of the word; and everyone knows she is a star. Miss Crawford will not appreciate your throwing away money on empty gestures. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MAKE EMPTY GESTURES TO PROVE TO MISS CRAWFORD OR ANYONE ELSE THAT SHE IS A STAR OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE.

JOAN’S TRAVELS CONCLUDED IN
early June, when she arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to play a role in yet another gothic horror movie, again with Bette Davis and again under the direction of Robert Aldrich (“who loves vile things”).
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte,
as the oddly punctuated title ran, was in production for ten days when an accident occurred. At the end of the day’s work at a mansion outside town, Joan was resting in her trailer when she awoke to see that it was dark—and that everyone in the company had left the location. Because of a mix-up in communications, she had not been informed that the cast and crew had packed up and left Louisiana. She made her own travel arrangements and, on arriving in Los Angeles, she felt ill.

Proceeding directly to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, she had her agent inform Aldrich that she had gone down with a respiratory infection and was unable to work. The schedule was rearranged to accommodate her, and she returned to work on July 20, obviously frail. Over the next several weeks, she was often absent—a situation unprecedented in her entire career. After severalmeetings with Joan, Aldrich made it clear to her that if the company could no longer rely on her, the film would have to be canceled and a small fortune would be lost. With that, she withdrew from
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte
and was replaced by Olivia de Havilland, who stepped in as a favor to her old friend Bette Davis and who greatly improved the script’s problems with the character in question. The scenes Joan had completed in Louisiana had to be refilmed, and replicas of buildings were reconstructed on the Fox lot.

She was not disappointed at this outcome. The production had become unlike anything Joan had known—more violently repellent, with more of the “horrendous and evil things” (butchered limbs, for example) that she so hated in an Aldrich movie. In addition, the script had been all but abandoned in favor of wholesale improvisation, and this offended her professional sensibility. Adding to her displeasure was the prospect of continuing to work with Bette Davis, who was a “silent” producer on
Charlotte
and who had behaved, during its Louisiana filming, as if it were her picture. Hence, although Joan certainly had physical ailments, she was also weary of the entire distasteful production; taken collectively, these conditions provided a convenient way for her to quit the movie.

By the end of August, she was pleased to be elsewhere—on the Universal lot, working for a third time with Diane Baker on the pilot for a television series that was eventually canceled. Joan played the title character, Della, a wealthy woman who seems to be holding her daughter captive on a vast estate. Years later, this one-hour episode was sent out in a limited theatrical release as
Fatal Confinement,
but it never found many admirers.

FROM 1965 THROUGH 1971,
Joan could be seen on local and national television talk shows, as well as quiz and game shows, with astonishing frequency. She also made media appeals on behalf of several charities and accepted invitations from hosts like Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball to join their comedy shows. But she was always a star and she wanted to work in films—and she needed the higher income Hollywood could offer. Thus she agreed to a trio of pictures that were to be her last, and they could not have been lessfortunate choices: William Castle’s
I Saw What You Did,
produced in early 1965; and
Berserk
and
Trog,
filmed in England in 1967 and 1969
²
Later, she virtually disowned these movies and refused to discuss them with interviewers; her contempt for them was widely shared by audiences.

In the Castle production, Joan briefly shrieked her way through a story about teenagers who make prank telephone calls; she also pursues a married neighbor, played by John Ireland, until her passion for him is killed—as is she, by a lethal thrust of his kitchen knife. Ireland, now a friend and no longer a lover, recalled Joan’s displeasure at the rudeness of the new breed of crew members. When an assistant director wanted the two leading actors brought onto the set, for example, he simply shouted, “Okay, bring ‘em on!”

Joan stopped everyone cold. “Young man,” she said in her most imperious tone and at full volume for all to hear, “I don’t know who the hell
‘em
is on this set, but let me tell you something. This is Mr. Ireland and I am Miss Crawford. I suggest you learn your craft and manners on some other set, not mine.” Considering both the material offered and the new (but not improved) conditions of filmmaking, it is easy to understand why
I Saw What You Did
was Joan’s last American feature film.

Before departing for London to film the hapless
Berserk,
Joan finally had to accept that she could no longer afford to live in the huge duplex on Fifth Avenue. She sold it, taking a loss on the combined purchase and renovation price, and bought a less expensive nine-room apartment on the twenty-second floor of Imperial House, located at 150 East Sixty-ninth Street. This residence, facing north and south, provided spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline; she furnished it with an eye on her budget and (because Billy Haines was ill in Los Angeles) with the help of a New York decorator named Carleton Varney.

At their first meeting, Joan asked Varney to use items she already owned. Together, they achieved a clean, functional look for the apartment by staining lighter tables to a dark teak hue and, according to the fashion of the time, painting all the walls white to set off the green and yellow sofas and accent pieces. A lime-green Parsons table served as Joan’s desk, and in a corner of the bedroom stood a pedestal with the bronze bust of her that Yucca Salamunich made in 1941 and gave her during the filming of
A Woman’s Face.
(Joan used the bust in
Strait-Jacket,
where it was featured as the work of the character played by Diane Baker.)

The new apartment was far more comfortable and casual than any previous Crawford residence. Plastic covers were used to protect the furniture from her dogs, but, as friends recalled, they were not used all the time. And because she now preferred polished parquet floors without carpeting, it was unnecessary for guests to remove their shoes.

“I was the cosmetician and she was the director,” Varney recalled in 2002. “She blocked out the floor with tape in each empty room and walked around as if she was playing scenes, to sense the way a room was going to work. She enjoyed being neat, clean and tidy, even to the point of covering all her chairs and sofas with plastic.” He also remembered that Joan was “a terribly generous person. She never failed to send a thank-you note, or to call when you were ill.”

When she was at home, Joan maintained a rigorous schedule, dictating letters to her secretary, answering fan mail, supervising tasks assigned to her housekeeper but doing most of the housework herself. “I’m up early most mornings,” she told a reporter in 1969, “doing the chores, driving everyone crazy even though I have help. I like to do things for myself—scrubbing floors, ironing my own things, vacuuming …” And if she was away from home on location for a picture, the procedure was very much the same. Arriving for an interview at the suite arranged for her at the Grosvenor House, London, writer Alexander Walker found her wearing a cloth robe and a towel on her head: she ironed her clothes throughout their conversation, for that evening she expected a delegation from a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Lebanon.

BERSERK
WAS IN EVERY way a horror—the production values, the script and the cheapjack plot about gruesome murders in a circus managed by Joan, in the role of circus owner, manager and ringmistress Monica Rivers. As if producer Herman Cohen had modeled his picture on
Strait-Jacket,
the villain turns out to be Monica’s daughter, Angela (played by Judy Geeson).

“When Joan arrived,” recalled producer Herman Cohen, “she had four cases of hundred-proof vodka with her, because that strength is unavailable in England. In spite of her sipping the vodka, she was very professional during
Berserk,
and she never took a drink unless I okayed it. She always knew her lines and she was always on time—in fact, she came in very early in the morning to cook breakfast for anyone who had an early call. She was strong-willed and tough—but tough as she was, she could be reduced to tears at the drop of a hat, and there were scenes in our movie when she had to do just that.”

The emotion was real. “Joan was a very lonely lady,” Cohen continued, recalling that she frequently rang him in the middle of the night to discuss a script point. “She did that because she was lonely, staying up at night, sipping her vodka, going over her lines for the next day.”

Judy Geeson agreed: “Joan Crawford said she was lonely, and I could see and feel that she was. She wasn’t easy, but I think
Berserk
was hard on her precisely because it
was
a B-movie. And there was something very likable about her—after all, when people show their vulnerabilities, it’s hard not to forgive them for other things.” Michael Gough, cast in the role of Joan’s business manager and sometime lover, located some of her loneliness in the fact that Joan said she felt cast aside in America—relegated to the dustbin in her senior years.

“She wears her loneliness like a badge,” observed the writer Roderick Mann, who interviewed her while he was in London that season, and when the subject surfaced, Joan was forthright. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t lonely. I didn’t have much chance to be lonely during my marriage to Alfred, but I’ve been pretty darned lonely since then. You just learn to live with it. You don’t dwell on it. You read a good book—about other lonely people. I’ve never had an ounce of self-pity in my life, and I’m not about to start now.”

Back in New York in early 1968, Joan resumed her travels for Pepsi-Colaand made no fewer than thirteen television appearances during the first nine months of the year. During one of her trips, she learned that Franchot Tone, then sixty-three, was suffering with lung cancer. He had married and divorced three more wives since the years with Joan, and now he was alone. At once she canceled an important business meeting and rushed to his summer cottage in Canada, where he was resting after completing his last movie role. She brought in food, cleaned the place thoroughly and departed only when she was assured that medical help was nearby. Months later, when Franchot was mortally ill and unable to cook or care for himself at his Manhattan residence, Joan often brought him to her apartment for dinner. John Springer recalled visits to Imperial House when he saw Joan caring for Franchot, several days at a time and at her own expense; by this time, he had lost his fortune through unwise investments, alimony suits and foolish extravagances. When Franchot died on September 18 that year, she saw that his requests were honored for cremation and for the scattering of his ashes over the Canadian lake near his cottage.

THAT SAME MONTH, JOAN and Christina volunteered to donate time working for Jerry Lewis’s charity telethon, raising money to fight muscular dystrophy. Photographs of mother and daughter working together show two adults fielding telephone calls and, during an interval, laughing together and evidently enjoying one another’s company. Some have claimed that Joan was not sober that evening, especially during her recital of a poem and her brief conversation with Lewis, and that may have been true. But her stumbling speech may in fact have been caused by her lifelong stage fright and incurable anxiety when speaking before a live audience.

A few weeks later, Christina required emergency surgery in New York, where she was working under contract to CBS, playing a twenty-four-year-old housewife on the daily afternoon soap opera
The Secret Storm.
Her sudden illness caused a major problem for the network—how to provide an immediate replacement for a twenty-nine-year-old actress on short notice. Joan, then sixty-two, leaped to the rescue, and in two days, she taped four brief appearances, to be broadcast that October. “I didn’t want them to give the role to someone else,” she told a reporter. On the telephone to Christina, she said, “I’ll never be as good as you in the role, but I’ll keep the spot warm for you.” From her hospital bed, Christina expressed her gratitude: she thought it was “fantastic that she would care that much.”