Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography

Preface

I knew Joan Crawford for thirty years. I first met Joan in 1947, during my first trip to Hollywood, on the set of Daisy Kenyon. I was then twenty-three years old and working for Hearst's Boston Record-American. I was in Hollywood not only to do stories on stars and movies, but also to interview some friends of my uncle, James R. Quirk of Photoplay, because I had gotten the idea to write a biography of him. At our first meeting, Joan asked me how old I was; when I told her, she muttered under her breath, "Cute!" (At the time, this was inexplicable to me). She told me that my uncle had helped her a lot in her career, and she was very helpful in introducing me to people who had known him and could pass on anecdotal material about him, such as William Haines, an actor with whom Joan made several films in the late 1920s. (I also asked these people about Joan, whom I found fascinating.) Many years later, Joan admitted to me that she had been one of the gals Louis B. Mayer had used to "entertain" visiting executives and the like when they were in California. The girls were provided as dates; whatever happened afterward was up to them. It even emerged that my uncle had been one of these men. Joan said that, unlike a lot of the other men, Uncle Jimmy always treated her with kindness. Joan began corresponding with me on the stationery she always used; her friend Jerry Asher (to whom she also introduced me) called them "Joan's baby blues." Over the years, Joan and I became friends. I met her again in 1952 while I was in the Army and she was appearing at a Broadway theater in connection with her new film Sudden Fear. She said then that she hoped that the movie would jump-start her career, which it did. In May 1956, Joan visited New York and I went down to Penn Station to greet her; a Columbia Pictures photographer took a picture of us. When I worked for the Motion Picture Herald in the late 1950s, she was so happy with my review of Autumn Leaves that she and her husband Alfred Steele invited me to '21' in 1957. At that meeting, x Preface Alfred said that it wasn't Joan's fault that her adopted son Christopher was behaving like a juvenile delinquent, and she went on a long disquisition of why Katherine Albert, a onetime writer for Uncle Jimmy, stopped speaking to her after Joan sponsored the wedding of Albert's daughter Joan (who was named after Crawford) to a man, Kirby Weatherly, ofwhom her mother did not approve. She and Albert had been very close friends until that time. Over the following years I dined with Joan frequently and often visited her on film sets for an interview or just to say hello. Joan was very generous to people she liked and tried to help them. During my tenure with various fan mags, I did my best to build up and enhance the reputation of Joan's Autumn Leaves costar Cliff Robertson, showcasing him as best I could despite the fact that many editors did not care for him, for one reason or another. Robertson was having trouble with the studio, as he didn't like the parts Columbia was offering him. Along with other friends of his, such as Wilson Ashley and his wife Roberta, Joan was very concerned for him when I mentioned the situation to her, because she thought he was a promising talent. She made a personal plea to Harry Cohn to give Robertson the right parts. Joan was very cooperative when I did a major story on her for Films in Review and a number of other articles on her for various fan mags (the People and Us of their day). Joan also made a point of inviting me to parties, not only promotional gatherings in restaurants but soirees at her various apartments in New York. She was extremely helpful and cooperative when I put together my first book, The Films of Joan Crawford, even going so far as to do publicity for the tome, although she made not one dollar for doing so. As her film career began to wind down, what had started out in 1947 as interviews with a lofty star had long since become simple conversations with a friend. Not that...