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on to book him or her. It took a long time before it finally dawned on most publishers that the quality of the book did indeed matter and that not every celebrity was guaranteed to sell books. Even in the late nineties, publishers still made the same costly mistake of supposing that because, say, Whoopi Goldberg was a big star, people would necessarily buy her book. (Of course, in the beginning, the big amounts were in hundreds of thousands of dollars, not in millions, as they later were.) Some celebrities sold books; some didn’t. It was a crapshoot, for high stakes, and the only person who never lost money doing it was Irving Lazar, who took home his commission of 10 percent and never looked back.

CHAPTER 21

Of course, there are celebrities and CELEBRITIES. In our age, the biggest celebrities are movie stars, but even among movie stars there is a pecking order. I started off at the top, when in 1970 an agent called me to ask if I would be interested in publishing a book by Joan Crawford. If I was, she would like to meet me. We agreed upon a date for a drink at Crawford’s apartment.

Of course I was not just interested—I was fascinated. It’s not, mind you, that I was a fan of Joan Crawford’s. “Nourri dans le sérail, j’en connais les détours”—having been brought up in the movie business, I’m inoculated against making a cult of any movie star, though if I was going to make a cult of any star, it would be Vivien Leigh or Catherine Deneuve, rather than Joan Crawford. Still, except for Lillian Gish, hardly anybody covered such a vast stretch of movie history, and very few people have been bigger stars for as many years. Besides, I had always been interested in Joan Crawford ever since my Auntie Merle told me, over her dinner table at the Malibu Colony, a story about Crawford. Having just announced her retirement, Crawford was coming out of a restaurant in Hollywood when a young girl ran up to her as she was getting into her limousine on Sunset Boulevard. “Oh, Miss Crawford,” she cried out, holding out her autograph book, “you’re my favorite star! Could I please have your autograph?”

Joan Crawford looked at her, her big eyes focused on the young girl’s like those of a falcon about to swoop on its prey, and with an icy smile, in her deep, silky voice, she said: “Go away, little girl. I don’t need you anymore.”

As it turned out, Joan Crawford needed all the fans she could get, once she staged the first of her many comebacks, and by the time I met her she was no longer turning away fans in the street. She had made a kind of camp comeback in movies such as The Best of Everything, in which she played a corporate-executive equivalent of Mel Brooks’s Nurse Diesel, then retired from the screen again but returned to achieve full-camp stardom in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? In search of the kind of financial and emotional stability that had always eluded her, she had some years before married Alfred Steele, the swaggering CEO of Pepsi-Cola. For a time she gave a compelling and successful performance as a corporate wife and Pepsi spokeswoman, but this was cut short by Steele’s death. The directors of Pepsi, whom she had supposed to be loyal to her late husband and fans of hers, turned out, to her surprise, to hate her guts and hardly even waited until Steele’s body was cold before stripping her of her corporate perks and contesting the provisions Steele had made for her. Their behavior was to embitter Joan Crawford’s last years, and her decision to do a book was an attempt to strike back by proving that she was still a star. It was not just a case of television appearances helping the sale of a book: The whole purpose of the book was to rack up television appearances so that every time the directors of Pepsi and their frumpy wives turned on the TV set, they would see Joan Crawford on the screen, telling her side of the story.

Joan Crawford had fallen on bad times since her days as the Queen of Pepsi-Cola. She was living in one of those featureless, postwar, modern apartment buildings made of white brick, like giant lavatories,