Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (34 page)

The jobs were minor at first. For ten thousand dollars, Crawford agreed to act as a hostess that November, shaking hands at the opening of a hotel in Las Vegas. Some critics thought the actress was demeaning herself, but writer John O'Hara defended her employment. She was worth every penny, O'Hara believed, because Joan was an authentic celebrity, always punctual and glamorous. "There are, of course, actors and actresses who would gladly supply the oil if they could be sure Joan would be boiled in it," said the author. "I am not an actor and I am very fond of her."

In December, Crawford landed a one-picture deal at Universal. Old boyfriend Milton Rachmil offered her a low-budget suspense thriller called
Female on
the
Beach.
Checking in at the studio, Joan made her customary showy entrance. Wearing white shorts, a white shirt, a black bow tie, and black high heels, she drove onto the lot in her white Lincoln convertible. Carrying her two white miniature poodles, she headed for costume fittings and gave the once-over to the starlets gathered in the Universal wardrobe room. "She surveyed the room imperiously," said the resident blond sex symbol, Mamie Van Doren. "It was obvious that she was checking out the young ingenues to see who her new competition would be."

Zeroing in on Mamie, Joan said, "You have such a sweet face. You look like a doll."

"Thank you," said Mamie ("liking her in spite of myself").

"Have we met before?" Joan inquired.

Mamie tried to remind her they had, at the
Photoplay
awards two years before, when Joan was drunk and attacked Marilyn Monroe.

"Really?" said Joan. "I don't remember it. I would never forget a face like yours, dear."

Female on
the
Beach
was the story of an older, wealthy widow and a young good-looking beach bum who was out to kill her with love or a blunt instrument. To play the beach bum, Joan requested Tony Curtis. He was twenty-nine, the right age, but Rachmil told her he photographed too young for the role. Audiences would feel queasy if they saw the young Tony in bed with the older Joan. Jeff Chandler was only two years older than Curtis, but with his prematurely graying hair, and "wearing skintight pants and bathing suits," he appeared more compatible with the aging star.

"You're about as friendly as a suction pump," said Joan in character to her former boyfriend in the opening scene.

"I don't hate women," said Jeff. "I just hate the way they are."

"I wish I could afford you," murmured Joan.

"Save your pennies," Jeff advised, grabbing her in his arms.

She bites his wrist (the script read). He rips her dress off. Her eyes dilate. She clutches her breasts protectively. He kisses her brutally. She goes limp, then slowly her arms, as if moved by a will of their own, go gliding around him, her fingers dig greedily into his flesh.

"Just once," the lonely but worldly-wise widow sighs, "just once, love me a little."

When 1955 dawned, Crawford's personal fortunes rose considerably. She signed a three-picture deal with Columbia. Her first film would be
Queen Bee,
in which she played a ruthless, depraved Southern woman who dominates and destroys those who loved her. ("That wasn't any acting job on Mother's part," said Christina. "It was exactly the way I knew her at home.")

In the spring, Joan found true love again. He was Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi-Cola. "Not one of her usual glamour boys," Steele was portly, older, but a powerful take-charge man. "He loves me even without my makeup; and in the sack he's a
tiger!"
said Joan happily. On the night of May 9 they flew to Las Vegas in his Pepsi jet and got married.

Back home, Joan told daughter Christina that Steele was too fat, wore glasses, and was hard of hearing in one ear, but he was a nice man, and she instructed the girl to introduce herself. "When I tried to kiss my new father," said fifteen-year-old Christina, "Mother slapped me and pushed me up against the wall. 'Damn it,' she said, 'I got my man, you go out and get your own.'"

For a honeymoon, the couple sailed from New York to Capri, where they were serenaded at night by the villagers. In Rome and Paris the rich Mrs. Steele bought new wardrobes for her children ("But our school bills were
still
not paid," Christina whined). Stateside, the press were told that the Steeles would have two homes, his town house on Sutton Place in New York; and her mansion in Brentwood. In August the couple flew to Los Angeles so Joan could begin work on her second film for Columbia. As Mrs. Alfred Steele, she soon let Hollywood know that she was no longer hustling for jobs, or publicity. Invited to a cocktail party for a trade-paper columnist, she sent a magnum of champagne with her regrets. She explained that, as a working star and an executive's wife, her schedule left no time for socializing. Writer Bob Sherman was hired as dialogue coach on her new film,
Autumn Leaves,
and he recalled meeting with the star at that time. "Bob Aldrich, the director, asked me if I'd go out to Crawford's house on a Sunday afternoon, to go over the script with her," said Sherman. "When I got there, I was ushered through the white living room, with the white couch and white pillows and white rugs. At the back of the house, two little girls were dressed in their white crinoline dresses, playing with two white French poodles. Mister Pepsi-Cola [AI Steele] was standing by the Greek white pool area, with two white pool houses on each side. And then I saw Joan. She was lying on a white chaise longue, wearing sunglasses, having a manicure and a pedicure while dictating letters to a secretary sitting on one side. She patted a chair on her other side and I sat there, reading lines to her whenever she had a moment to spare. She was playing the 'executive-actress' to the hilt."

Accompanied by her secretary, Crawford arrived at the studio in a long black limousine. Wearing her daytime pearls, she gave dictation as they cruised through the lot. Suddenly Joan spied a familiar figure exiting from one of the buildings. She instructed the driver to slow down and follow: As the car drove alongside, the glamorous Joan lowered her window and called out to the matronly figure walking along the street.

"Bette? Is that really you?" said Joan.

"Hello,
Joan,"
said Bette Davis, at Columbia to make a film called
Storm Center.

"Darling," said Joan, "can we give you a lift?"

Bette kept walking.

"I got married," said Joan.

"Good!"
said Bette.

"Can I give you a call?" said Joan.

"No,"
said Bette, and without a hint of goodbye, she turned a sharp right into a cul-de-sac and disappeared through the side door of a soundstage.

Settling back in her limo, Joan turned to her Pepsi stenographer and said, "Do you know who that was?"

"No," said the stenographer.

"That was Bette
Davis,"
said Joan.

"No," said the stenographer with surprise.

"Yes," said Joan, quite pleased, "and she looks old enough to be my mother."

"Black Years" for Bette

"I went back to work because
someone had to pay for the
groceries."

—BETTE DAVIS, 1955

I
n 1954 Bette and Gary Merrill's three-year-old adopted daughter, Margot, was diagnosed as retarded. Refusing to return the child to the adoption agency, the distraught couple enrolled the girl in a special school in Geneva, New York. Later that same year Merrill's contract with Twentieth-Century Fox was canceled, and in February 1955 Bette went back to work. "They're all fatter and richer and stupider than ever," she said of the people in Hollywood upon her return, yet she did accept the work and the fifty thousand dollars that Darryl Zanuck offered her to repeat her role as the older, more imperious Elizabeth the First in
The Virgin Queen.

Her costar, Richard Todd, was a shy, competent actor, but another British import, the fresh sultry Joan Collins, was not to Bette's liking. "She can speak correctly," said the plump Bette, "but she can't act for shit."

"I had been warned that Miss Davis did not take kindly to pretty young actresses and she lashed out at me a couple of times," said Joan.

In August, when she went to Columbia Pictures to play a librarian in
Storm Center,
Bette bumped into Joan Crawford, and also had a very unpleasant experience with the head of the studio, Harry Cohn. Known for his antipathy toward women of talent but unconventional looks (openly berating actresses Judy Holliday and Kim Stanley), Cohn admitted he liked sexy women with "good tits and a keister."

Earlier that month, when Crawford checked in for
Autumn Leaves,
the studio boss welcomed her to his office. Over drinks, he said he was willing to forget their differences of the past. (He fired her from
From Here to Eternity;
and once, at Ciro's, she lambasted his eating habits with: "My dogs have better table manners.") He admired her style and talent, Cohn said in his office that day, and she had guts. During this spiel, the mogul stood up behind his desk, and placing his hands in his trousers, he commenced to play a very active game of pocket pool. They were going to make some hit movies together, the mogul promised. Racking up an impressive lower score, he moved closer to Crawford. Until she stopped him in his tracks. "Keep it in your pants, Harry," she warned the mogul. "I'm having lunch with Joan and the boys [his wife and young sons] tomorrow."

When Bette arrived at Columbia, she was assigned the star dressing room. One night, after shooting, she was sitting at her makeup table cold-creaming her face, when the wall next to her swung open and Harry Cohn walked in. Without looking at her, he "made an obscene gesture," until Bette screamed, "How dare you come in here. Get out immediately!" Harry fled. The next day, when she told the story to her producer, her ego was deflated. Cohn wasn't looking for sex with her. He was on the prowl for Kim Novak, whose dressing room she occupied, and who had been moved to a larger suite without notification to the boss.

That fall Bette realized another early dream when she went to work at Crawford's old studio, M-G-M. "Unfortunately," she said, "the studio was no longer the symbol of glamour and grandeur; nor was I." For her role as Aggie Hurley in
The Catered Affair,
she padded her body, powdered her arms (to make them appear heavier and older), subdued all of her familiar mannerisms, and gave what she considered was "the most unappreciated but self-satisfying performance of my career."

When the picture was completed, Bette and Gary Merrill, intent on putting some harmony into their marriage, bought a black Mercedes SL 190 "with red leather seats," and drove to Florida for a second honeymoon, without the children or an entourage.

Joan Crawford also traveled extensively that year. In August, accompanied by husband Alfred Steele, she went to England with forty two pieces of luggage. Her traveling wardrobe, with a change for every three hours, included five fur stoles, one full-length mink, half a dozen jeweled sweaters, thirty-six pairs of shoes, four suits, twenty-five cocktail dresses, twenty daytime cotton dresses, and twenty-five Jean Louis evening gowns—ten of which were old but rehemmed to accommodate the new shorter styles.

Sweeping up to the Dorchester Hotel in a long black limousine, the couple were followed by three white Pepsi vans atop of which was Joan's luggage, with each piece embossed "J.C." At a press conference in the Oliver Messel suite, the star told the reporters she was there to make a film entitled
The Golden Virgin
(changed to
The Story of Esther Costello).
She was the star and coproducer. Mindful of the latter responsibility, and of her new position as the wife of an important cost-conscious company executive
("My
darling Alfred Steele. Stand up and take a bow, dear"), she had gone over the film's budget and cut some of the expenses to the bone. The original budget for her movie wardrobe was seventy thousand dollars. "But after countless grueling hours of conferences, she whittled it down to a measly $40,000, by such drastic measures as leaving the mink off the bottom of one dress and having a coat lined with velvet instead of real seal."

At a "Hello London" party held at the Les Ambassadeurs club in 1956, Joan asked that her guests wear either ballerina or full-length gowns. "She herself wore a gown of her own creation—an aquamarine silk organza, embroidered with green and blue sequins, short in front and long at back." Flanked by old friends Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier, Mr. and Mrs. Steele greeted such guests as Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, John Gielgud, Dame Edith Evans, Helen Hayes (who came straight from the set of
Anastasia),
and Rita Hayworth, who arrived stag, wearing no makeup or jewelry, yet she was asked to dance every dance, "and at the evening's end she waltzed off with the boyfriend of the much younger starlet, Joan Collins."

Notable no-shows from Crawford's party were Ingrid Bergman, who pleaded fatigue from
Anastasia
filming; and Sir Laurence's current costar in
The Prince and the Showgirl,
Marilyn Monroe, who sent a telegram explaining that at the last minute she had come down with the flu.

Marilyn would annoy Joan further when the two stars were invited to meet the reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second. "The Queen is a lady, and expects to meet other ladies, but most of today's actresses can't even act politely," said Joan when Marilyn, Anita Ekberg, and Arlene Dahl failed to attend the afternoon rehearsals for the Royal Command performance. "That night," said Joan, "as her majesty came up the staircase, Monroe's hairdresser was still doing her hair. And the girl didn't even know how to curtsy."

When
Esther Costello
was completed, Crawford and Al Steele hit the Pepsi trail, logging over 125,000 miles, opening bottling plants from Denmark to West Germany to South Africa. Back in New York, they bought two penthouse apartments at 32 East Seventieth Street and proceeded to convert them into a duplex, reducing sixteen rooms to eight including Joan's spacious geranium-pink bedroom, with an open fireplace, and a special custom-built closet for her three hundred pairs of shoes. To help with the one-million-dollar renovations, the star sold her house in Los Angeles. At a Pepsi stockholders meeting, a "gadfly" voter questioned the cost of the apartment to the company, and was told that Mr. Steele had been advanced a loan of $387,000, which he was to return at 6-percent interest. When the voter asked to talk to Mrs. Steele, Joan Crawford rose, took a bow, then ordered the stockholder to "Make it brief, boy." When he asked how many shares of stock she owned, Joan snapped, "It's none of your business. Besides I owned them before I married Mr. Steele." As another stockholder insisted on making critical comments about the management, Joan was heard to murmur, "Shut up, shut up." "If anyone attacks my husband, I bristle," she told
Variety.

On Thanksgiving night, when Pepsi sponsored the TV special
Annie Get Your Gun,
starring Mary Martin, some last-minute changes were made in the commercial messages. Miss Martin had been asked to deliver the end-of-the-show holiday greetings, but she was bumped and replaced by Joan Crawford. Sitting beside her husband and her "twin" daughters in front of an open fireplace in their penthouse apartment, Joan wished viewers across the nation the happiest of times. "It was an ideal arrangement," said the star's third but unseen daughter, Christina, referring to her mother's new role as the official Pepsi spokeswoman. "It enabled her to play 'movie star' again, to throngs of adoring fans."

Christina it seemed also had a yen to become famous during this time. After a year of college, she dropped out and decided to become an actress in New York. She got her own apartment, with furniture supplied by Joan Crawford. But Tina did not appreciate her mother's decorating, or her help in getting media coverage for her aspiring career. Booked on the Jack Paar TV show through Joan's influence, Tina was radiant during the first few minutes of her interview, but got visibly miffed when Paar asked too many questions about her famous mother and not enough about her own anonymous eighteen-year-old self. The next day, after complaining to Joan, she was told to go out and make it on her own. Crawford also forbade her to use her established surname. "You're cruel. You're hard. You want me to suffer," Tina yelled at her mother in front of a reporter. "You're right, dear," said Joan, "I
do
want you to suffer. I want you to struggle and fear and worry the way I did. I want you to fight every step of the way, because when you suffer you don't forget. That's what it takes to become an actress, a star, something great; and not just a personality."

Crawford's fifteen-year-old son, Christopher, also appeared in the news that year, when he and three other boys were arrested in Greenport, New York, after a wild three-day shooting spree with air guns. They shot out a hundred windows in private homes, at streetlights, and at two girls, who received facial injuries. When informed of the incident, his mother got hysterical. Al Steele told a reporter that the boy was "morally insane," and that he had been living at the home of a psychiatrist in Greenport for several years. "The other three Crawford children are 'all jewels,'" said Mr. Steele.

When Christopher was sent to a reformatory, Joan broke the news to her grieving "twins." "Your brother didn't live up to society's expectations," she explained, "and society has a way of taking care of these things. When he learns to behave the way he is expected to behave, he'll come back home."

Early in May 1959, after a barnstorming eight-week tour through the United States, opening new plants and attending conventions, Alfred Steele and his wife returned to New York to repack for a vacation in Bermuda the following Monday. On Saturday night they watched TV together, played a hand of gin rummy, then went to bed. The following morning, when Joan arose, she found the bed empty. Her husband was sprawled out on the bedroom floor. "She ran over to him, crouched down and touched his forehead," said a movie magazine. "She felt his pulse then put her hands to her face and began screaming. Tears were running down her face. It was more than ten minutes later before she became calm enough to go to the telephone and call a doctor."

At fifty-seven, her husband had died of a heart attack. "He had drunk too many cocktails, eaten too many banquet meals, flown on too many jets," said the Associated Press. "It was the combination of too much work and too many pep pills," said
Variety.

Joan arranged the funeral, down to the exact seating in the limos. Two days later she met with the Pepsi board. They told her they were appreciative of her efforts on behalf of the company. She would be receiving her late husband's death benefits, including a partial pension, but her days as a spokeswoman were over. They also asked that her late husband's estate repay his outstanding personal loans as soon as possible. Wearing a black hat, veil, and black gloves, Joan listened calmly to their requests; then, after peeling off one glove and the other, she placed them in front of her, regally lifted the veil of her hat, and told the board, "Don't fuck with me, fellas. I've fought bigger sharks than you."

"My husband loved me for my spirit and soul and he'd come back and haunt me through eternity if I didn't go on now with happiness and joy," Joan told Louella Parsons that evening. She also confessed to the syndicated columnist that she was flat broke. "I haven't a nickel. Only my jewels. His company did not reimburse me for the half million dollars I spent on the apartment."

"It was a sob story that would have brought tears to a glass eye," said Louella, who printed the entire confession, in an attempt to shame the giant corporation.

Within a week, Pepsi announced that Joan had been elected to fill her late husband's position on the company's board of directors. She would be receiving forty thousand dollars annually for the next five years, her own office, a secretary, and the use of the Pepsi plane, which would be redecorated in colors of aquamarine, turquoise, and brown.

"I told myself, 'Why stay home and mope? Pick yourself up and be the glamorous person you're supposed to be," said Joan, announcing plans to return to California to appear in Jerry Wald's
The
Best of Everything.
It was only a cameo role, but Crawford would receive sixty-five thousand dollars and her customary star privileges. On the days she appeared, the set was cooled to fifty degrees, which caused the stars of the film, Hope Lange and Stephen Boyd, "to do an Irish rhumba to keep warm." Reporter Charlotte Dinte described a tense shooting scene between Joan and Hope Lange. Joan, as Amanda Farrow, a waspish editor, was to leave junior editor Hope's office and close the door behind her. They shot the scene once, then twice. On the third try, Hope interrupted. "Would you mind letting me close the door when you leave?"