Excerpt
from Hedda Hopper's Hollywood (1962)
Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she
was a
hoofer named Lucille Le Sueur. She's been put to the sacrificial flames more
than once, but has always risen like Lazarus and lived to burn another
day.
She's cool, courageous and thinks like a man. She labors
twenty-four hours a day to keep her name in the pupil of the public eye.
She'll time her arrival at a theater seconds before the curtain goes up
and make such an entrance that the audience sees only her through act one,
scene one. The actors on stage may hate it, but she's having a ball. If she
has a surviving fan club in any city she's visiting, she'll carefully supply
its president in advance with a complete schedule for the day, detailed to
the minute, and collect such crowds that by evening there'll be a mob
hundreds strong escorting her.
She was called box-office poison and
couldn't get a job for years after her Metro contract ended. Out of money,
she continued to play the star and hold her head high, and she had the town's
sympathy. Mildred Pierce put her back in pictures and won her an Oscar, as
much for bravery under fire as for her acting. The same gutsy
quality showed when her husband, Al Steele, died and she took on a job
as traveling ambassador for his company, Pepsi-Cola. Just before that he'd
arranged for her to visit the Strategic Air Command base at Omaha, Nebraska.
Typically, she went though with the visit alone. Going on from there to
Hollywood, she told me about it over dinner at the home of Billy Haines, once
a picture star, now a top decorator with Joan among his
customers.
Nothing would suit but I had to see SAC, too. She fixed it
with General Thomas Power, the commander in chief. The Air Force flew
me out from Los Angeles. Joan, who'd meantime returned to New York, came on
from there on a commercial flight that got in an hour ahead of me. I found
her waiting at the airport, with the mayor of the city in tow. She hadn't yet
checked into the hotel suite we were sharing, so we went straight to the SAC,
where General Power took us through the most amazing setup you could dream
of. Joan and I rode to town together in the chauffeured limousine Mr. Mayor
had put at her disposal.
She had enough luggage and hatboxes with her
to fill a department store. She carried a jewel case two feet long. "I always
travel with it," she told us. "By the way [this to the mayor] would you be
kind enough to provide someone to guard my jewels. I'll need two men--one for day and one for night."
"Certainly, Miss Crawford," he said,
hypnotized. "Whatever you need, just ask for it."
Our suite consisted
of a living room and two separate bedrooms, one for Joan, and one for me. As
soon as we'd checked in, she unpacked. For our two-day visit she brought
twenty-two dresses, which she spread out all over the room, and fourteen hats.
"I don't know what I'll want to wear," she explained seriously when my
eyebrows hit my hairline, "so I brought them along in case."
We were
no sooner unpacked than she rang for an iron and ironing board. The iron the
bellboy brought wasn't the kind she liked, so she sent him out to buy a new
one. With it, she proceeded to press every one of the dresses and hand each
in its cellophane wrapper in her closet.
"Would you like to see my
jewels?" she asked. I nodded, speechless. She unlocked the case and --
abracadabra! -- It was like peering at Aladdin's treasure, half a million
dollars' worth; trays and trays loaded with diamonds and emeralds and pearls,
bracelets and necklaces and earrings.
"This is the most dangerous
thing you've ever done," I said. "Someday you'll wake up with your throat
cut."
"But I always have it guarded," she said, "and I keep it beside me
on the plane."
"Why isn't it in a safety deposit box?"
"I like
to look at them," she said, as though she were talking to an idiot.
I
went into my room for a minute. When I came back into the living room, she
had disappeared. "Where are you?" Her voice came from the bathroom: "In
here." She was on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor. "It wasn't very
clean!"
Next to the goddess in their prayers, many of the worshipers
place a compulsive kind of cleanliness. Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day
--they'll shower three times a day like pilgrims in the Ganges trying to
wash away their sins. But only Joan and Garbo will personally scrub the
bathroom or kitchen floor to make sure there are no germs lingering
there.
The mayor returned to make us his guests at a small dinner party.
We both wore simple dresses because Omaha doesn't run much to
evening clothes. We were back in the hotel by eleven-thirty and had Mr.
Mayor and two or three others up for a drink.
As soon as they had said
their good nights, Joan, who doesn't smoke, flung every window wide open and
carried the ash trays out into the hall, where her night guard had dutifully
stationed himself outside the door. She gathered up the glasses and washing
them in the kitchenette off the living room. She then unlocked another item
of her luggage that the bellboy had staggered under when we moved
in.
It was a massive chest perhaps a yard long, packed with ice.
It contained four bottles of hundred-proof vodka, bottles of her favorite
brand of champagne, a silver chalice, which she took out for her bedtime
ceremony. Into the chalice she poured a split of champagne and raised it in a
simple toast, "To Al," before she put it to her lips.
"What do you
want for breakfast," she asked when the chalice was empty.
"Can't we
order in the morning?"
"No, I like breakfast when I get up. I'll put our
order in tonight." I settled for juice, coffee, and a boiled egg. That taken
care of, we agreed that eight-thirty in the morning would suite us both as
time to arise. Come the morrow, I'd bathed when at eight-thirty
sharp there was a rapping at my bedroom door. In the living room stood
a waiter ready to serve us. Outside the front door stood a new
guard, keeping the daytime watch.
Then we spent a full, fascinating,
reassuring, awe-inspiring day at SAC; saw the H-bombers take off in a
practice scramble; again met General Power, who gave us dinner. I started
sleeping more easily from that night on as a restful of what I'd witnessed.
It seemed to me to be an up-to-date necessity in a fearful world where the
best rule for America's conduct was advocated by Teddy Roosevelt:
Speak softly and carry a big stick. The next morning, every inch a star
and clean as a hound's tooth, Joan flew on to Chicago, with her
twenty-two dresses, fourteen hats, jewel case, ice chest, and
silver chalice, to scrub another bathroom if she had to.
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