Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [173]
I nodded. The feud between Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford had been no secret. Crawford had complained that she had been upstaged by Monroe’s low-cut dress at some Hollywood function and remarked, rather too loudly, that she had tits too, but she didn’t let them hang out over her plate for everybody to see. Monroe, who greatly admired Crawford, heard about it and was crushed, or pretended to be, and most people in Hollywood took Monroe’s side, to Crawford’s dismay. As for strong directors, I thought, if she wanted to think of me as the publishing equivalent, so much the better, though I guessed that Joan—for we were instantly on a first-name basis—would be something of a handful, in fact.
Joan exuded movie-star charisma, despite her age, which was unfathomable. The famous eyes had not lost a bit of their sultry, intimidating glare; the face, though weathered, was still glamorous; and her figure would have been the envy of most women thirty years her junior. She still had great legs and knew it, but the eyes were her strongest features, as they always had been, at once imperious and deeply sad, so that it was possible to be frightened of her and feel sorry for her at the same time. She was small, not nearly as tall as I had expected, but she made up for it in sheer dynamism. Even sitting, sipping her vodka, she was in motion, fingers drumming, feet tapping, like a thoroughbred in its stall. Eventually, as if she couldn’t stand sitting for a moment longer, she stood up with the perfect grace and straight posture of the dancer she once had been and offered me a tour of the apartment.
I was not loath—this is, after all, an old form of Hollywood hospitality. The apartment, I instantly realized, was bigger than it had seemed to me at first, as if two adjoining apartments had been opened up into one. I admired Joan’s spotless kitchenette, her narrow terrace, a gleaming but not particularly luxurious or glamorous bathroom, a smallish bedroom, pretty much filled by a big bed and a television set, with a window that looked out over brownstone rooftops toward Blooming-dale’s. Joan flung open a walk-in closet to reveal row after row of shoes. Each shoe had a shoe tree inserted into it, and all the shoe trees matched and bore tiny labels that identified the shoes they were in. Above them hung several rows of coats, most of them in plastic zipper bags. There were, needless to say, no wire coat hangers to be seen.
We walked through Joan’s dressing room into what must have been the living room of the next apartment. To my surprise, it contained countless pipe racks of clothes, arranged in neat rows. Each dress or suit was contained in a zippered transparent plastic bag, which was meticulously labeled. On the labels, Joan pointed out with pride, were recorded where she had bought the dress, the date and price of purchase, and all the significant occasions when she had worn it, together with the accessories that she had worn with it. There were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of dresses in the room, and more in what had been the bedroom of the next apartment. She had probably not worn some of them for decades. It was hard to work out her priorities. There was more room in the apartment for her clothes than for herself and she must have been paying a substantial amount of rent in order to house them. The walls were mostly bare, the furniture looked as if it belonged beside a pool, and the parquet floors were either bare or covered with cheap fiber matting.