Possessed (46 page)

Christina described this annual holiday tradition
a la Crawford
as a fair example of her mother’s monstrous cruelty. But this method of distributing the presents seems, after all, a thoughtful response to outrageous excess and a way of preventing her children from becoming spoiled. “I haven’t got a clue whether any of [Christina’s horror stories] are true or not,” said Howard Cady, one of several editors who prepared
Mommie Dearest
for publication. “But as long as we’ve got those two scenes"—Joan’s destruction of a rose garden during a nighttime drinking spree, and the rage over wire hangers—"we’ll sell a million copies.” That number turned out to be conservative, and sales advanced exponentially on release of the film version, a horror movie heavy with factual errors past counting, which is typical of biographical motion pictures (or “biopics,” as they are called in the business).

IN EARLY APRIL 1972,
Joan rang the Manhattan offices of Columbia Pictures, which had distributed several of her recent pictures and arranged her publicity tours for them. She was rearranging her personal library; she wanted to give away some books; and, as usual, she wanted to have her extensive bookshelves in perfect order. “Who knows about books and is polite?” she asked Leo Jaffe, Columbia’s president. A thirty-one-year-old assistant story editor named Carl Johnes was recommended, and soon he arrived at Joan’s apartment to begin the temporary job of librarian.

Thus began a friendship deep and true, uncomplicated by romantic love. Neither a fawning devotee nor a scheming opportunist, Carl remained, during the last years of Joan’s life, one of the few she could count on for help, companionship and even advice. As usual for Joan in her friendships with gaymen, she rejoiced that Carl was living happily with a man, and he frequently returned home with a present she had given him. Later, he recalled this as “one of the most rewarding friendships” of his life.

That spring day, Carl found an entire twenty-foot-long wall with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that looked dangerously close to collapsing under the weight of about a thousand volumes.

“Well, you see the problem,” Joan said. “I just have to get rid of some of these, and I really don’t know where to start. We have to decide which ones go to the children, which to the grandchildren, and then there are various charities, and of course Brandeis,” the university where her friends Nate and Frances Spingold had established an arts center and, in Joan’s honor, a dance program. That first day, Carl found signed books dedicated to Joan with affectionate sentiments from Noël Coward, James M. Cain, Paul Gallico, Allen Drury and many others.

JOAN’S CHECKBOOK STUBS AND receipts for that year reveal a dazzling number and range of charities to which she sent donations: the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the March of Dimes, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, New York Hospital, the Layman’s National Bible Committee, the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (later renamed Memorial-Sloan Kettering), the New York Infirmary, the Republic School for Boys, Project Hope, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Southwest Indian Foundation, the Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine, the Heart Fund and the Korean Relief Fund.

Also: the United Services Organization (USO), the Catholic Actors Guild, the Wiltwyck School for Boys, the Winston Churchill Memorial Library, the Salvation Army, the New York Shakespeare Festival, Guiding Eyes for the Blind, the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, the Synagogue Council of America, the American Jewish Committee, the United Negro College Fund, the Epilepsy Foundation, the Boys Athletic League, the City of Hope, the Girl Scout Council of Greater New York, the Actors Studio and New York Universal Medical Center. In the last years of her life, the long listof charities to which she wrote checks expanded annually, as did the amounts of money she sent.

Joan’s correspondence with friends continued uninterrupted, as her archives attest. By 1972, she had known William Haines for forty-seven years. He always addressed her as he had decades earlier—she was his devoted “Cranberry,” the nickname he devised when she first said she hated “Crawford” in 1925. Billy and his lifelong partner, Jimmy Shields, always stayed in contact with Joan by phone and letter—not only when there was important news, but also to exchange recipes, tidbits of gossip or items of industry business. That year, he was trying to recover from a cancer surgery: “More than anything,” Billy wrote to Joan at Christmas 1972, “I am grateful for the long years of a deep and holy friendship.” She replied, adding her hopes for his speedy recovery and assuring him of prayers that the new year would be one of good health for him and Jimmy.

“In private life, Joan was a lovable, sentimental creature,” according to George Cukor. “A loyal and generous friend, very thoughtful—dear Joan, she forgot nothing: names, dates, obligations. These included the people at Hollywood institutions who had helped to make and keep her a star. When it was fashionable to rail against the studio system and the tycoons who had built it, she was always warm in their defense. She spoke of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a family in which she was directed and protected, provided with fine stories and just about every great male star to play opposite; later, she built up a similar relationship with Warners.”

Cukor was on the mark: Joan’s friendships were many, deep and enduring—a short list would have to include George himself; Haines and Shields; Anita Loos, who had written a quartet of important Crawford movies; Nate and Frances Spingold; John Springer; Dore Freeman, a young man for whom Joan had found a job at Metro and who became a lifelong confidant; Genie Chester, whom she had met in New York decades earlier … their names were legion.

“She never took any friendship for granted,” according to Carl Johnes. “In fact, I think that one of her many talents was the one for friendship—perhaps it was her greatest. Once she made the decision to enter into a real friendshipwith another person, she became devoted to that person forever. She worked at it, and she understood the importance of it.”

ON APRIL 8, 1973,
Joan was interviewed onstage at New York’s Town Hall. John Springer was producing a series of events at which major Hollywood stars spoke about their careers and answered questions from the audience. Another actress withdrew on short notice, and Joan sprang to John’s rescue. “It was a real act of friendship,” recalled Springer, “because she really didn’t like getting up before a live audience, and she was so frightened that we almost had to push her onstage. But when she stepped out to a rousing standing ovation, she began to relax, and she was wonderful, just wonderful—and those in the audience who weren’t in love with her when they arrived, certainly were when they left.”

Six days later, Joan picked up the morning newspaper and read that she had been dismissed from Pepsi’s board of directors; no one had had the courtesy to inform her personally about this, and at first she thought it was a wild rumor. Later, the company estimated that her interviews on their behalf on television and radio, and her publicized association with them in newspapers, magazines and books, had reached more than 350 million people worldwide: her name was indelibly linked to Pepsi wherever the soft drink was sold.

Her dismissal from the company meant a reduction of sixty thousand dollars in Joan’s annual income. At once she asked the management of Imperial House if a smaller apartment might be available, and in September, with the help of Carl Johnes and a few other able friends, she moved from the nine rooms of unit 22-G into 22-H, which had five rooms. When the superintendent and his crew made the routine final inspection of the empty 22-G, they were amazed to find the apartment cleaner and in better condition than on any previous occasion when a tenant had vacated a residence in the building. “Well,” Joan said with a wink when they complimented her on the care she had taken, “I didn’t play Harriet Craig for nothing.” They may not have caught the reference, which was recalled by a friend who was present.

The new, smaller apartment was her home for the last four years of her life. Sparsely but brightly decorated in yellow, lime green and white, the parquet floors waxed to a high sheen, the place featured no new pieces, and she gave away a great deal of furniture she had deposited in storage from Brentwood, East Seventieth Street and 22-G.

Joan had to laugh at herself when, before she welcomed a team from
Architectural Digest,
she recalled the gamut of styles she had tried and discarded over five decades. In her first rented house, in Beverly Hills, she had hung paintings of dancing girls with blond hair, rhinestones and pearls, done on black velvet. When Paul Bern first saw this display, “he gulped—and I got rid of them fast.” After that, she had Billy Haines’s advice, which caused more than a few arguments—"but he always won because of his excellent taste and knowledge, and my lack of both.” Her next home was decorated in what Billy called “Ming Toy Cocktail Chinese.” Then came her Early American phase—"I was hooking my own rugs, and there were little rocking chairs all over the place.” That was followed by her baroque period, and then came eighteenth-century English. But by the end of 1973, everything had become much simpler indeed, and not only for economic reasons. At sixty-seven, she longed for simplicity, in life as in furnishings.

The day after Christmas, Joan had a call from Jimmy Shields: Billy Haines had succumbed to cancer at the age of seventy-three. She was confined with bronchitis that week and could not attend the funeral in California, but she telephoned Jimmy every day for almost a month, which comforted him enormously; they reminisced, laughed and wept together. Three months later, Jimmy wrote a note—"It’s no good without Billy"—and took an overdose of sleeping pills. With those two deaths, as Joan said, she lost “the happiest married couple I ever knew.”

Joan now began to refer to herself as an “ex-movie star.” This self-designation began, as she said, when she “was waiting for an elevator, and I actually heard a woman beside me say to another, ‘See her? She used to be Joan Crawford.’ I couldn’t burst into tears because I was about to speak [at a charity board meeting], but at that moment, I suddenly felt old, and I’ve felt old ever since.” She did not like the movies Hollywood was grinding out, andshe especially loathed
The Exorcist,
the biggest commercial success of 1973. As for the film and television projects her agents sent, “Most of them are trash,” as she told an interviewer. Eventually, she told the men at the William Morris Agency to stop sending her scripts.

Joan was now, as her friends saw, achingly alone. “I have too much loneliness,” she said to a visitor one evening. “But I guess people figure, what the hell have I got to say that’s interesting? I’m not an actress any more; I’m not a so-called executive [with Pepsi] any more. I’m not involved in politics. God knows I’m not an intellectual. I’m a private person, and I don’t speak well off the top of my head. My vocabulary is limited, and it shrinks up completely when someone asks a question. So I guess people don’t think I’m very interesting.” That was a pity, as former directors like Vincent Sherman and Charles Walters insisted. “She was very lonely in the last years,” said Walters, “and a lot of people deprived themselves of her vibrant company. They were the losers. She could certainly be difficult and demanding, but the rewards of her friendship were incalculable.”

Much of the first half of 1974 was taken up with painful operations due to periodontal disease and bacterial infections in her jaw. In July, she was resting at home but could not invite friends: “I’m so sorry I can’t see you,” she told the writer Adele Whitely Fletcher, whom she had known for fifty years. “I’m having this painful dental work, which I’d rather you not mention—I don’t want everybody clucking that I’m really having a face-lift. When I do, I’ll say so myself.” After the quick procedure she had at the time of
Torch Song,
Joan never had additional cosmetic surgery; as she explained to a friend: “After all, I don’t want to look as if I haven’t lived.”

When her old friend Rosalind Russell was honored at a reception at the Rainbow Room that September, Joan gladly attended; they had never lost contact since their first meeting and collaboration in 1934. The party was a noisy, crowded affair, but the two old friends managed to steal a few moments together. Russell, cheerful and valiant, was very ill with rheumatoid arthritis, and she was suffering the side effects of frequent cortisone injections. She did not tell anyone that she had also recently received a diagnosis of cancer. The press took pictures all evening, and over the next several days Joan was not the only one horrified at the newspaper photos: it seemed as if editors had gleefully selected the most unflattering shots of the two stars. “If that’s the way I look,” said Joan, “they’ve seen the last of me.” With extremely rare exceptions, she kept her word: for the next three years, Joan was virtually a recluse.

In her solitude, she drank more than ever, and one evening in December 1974, she took a terrible fall. Suffering a deep cut on her forehead, two black eyes and a badly bruised arm, she had to have nursing care for a week. But the accident had a remarkable outcome: Joan never took so much as a sip of alcohol for the rest of her life. It would be impossible to make this assertion with any certainty were it not for the witness of all her close friends and her twin daughters, who had begun to visit with their own children, making the trip from their homes outside New York.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. visited Joan several times in her last years, and he recalled her drinking tea or Pepsi while he had Scotch. Their friendship had been interrupted only during the war, and their occasional meetings were always amiable; to others, they spoke about one another only in the most affectionate and respectful terms.

“It was a remarkable achievement that she stopped drinking,” according to Johnes, who had previously seen Joan down three double vodkas in a short time. Henceforth, she served alcoholic drinks to him and one or two other guests, but she did not join them. Why had she given it up? “I really don’t think I knew who I was any more,” she told Carl, “and I wanted to find out.” She spent the rest of her life finding out, and the discovery bore dividends. Instead of perpetually assuming other identities through her work, the real Joan Crawford emerged from the shadows—generous to friends in every way possible, lavish to charities and never a burden to anyone, even when she was mortally ill. When she learned, for example, that her former Los Angeles assistant, Betty Barker, was bringing a few relatives and friends to Manhattan for their first visit, Joan paid their airfare, bought them theater tickets and paid for all their meals for sixteen days. There were many such displays of generosity.