Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [174]
We returned to the living room, having looked at every closet and storage space in the house, to talk about the book. What she wanted to do, she explained, was to give other women, perhaps less privileged than she, the benefit of her experience in managing a successful career and a busy family life. People admired her for her glamour and her energy, but they didn’t see the hard work that went into looking good or appearing upbeat and cheerful however you were really feeling inside. The book would have beauty hints, tips on how to dress, advice on how to keep a husband happy and entertain his boss, all of it interspersed with anecdotes from Joan’s own life.
I found it hard to see how the average woman was going to put Joan Crawford’s helpful hints to use in her own life—they included the right way to serve caviar and how to train your maid to pack your clothes so they don’t get wrinkled or crushed—but it is not in the nature of book publishers to harbor negative thoughts (the lifeblood of publishing is enthusiasm, after all, not caution), and in any case Joan, whatever her other talents, was a great saleswoman for her own cause. The great eyes were mesmerizing, and even at her fairly advanced age she fairly radiated sex appeal. She was not then or ever an easy woman to say no to, as countless people before me had discovered.
She envisioned—as most celebrities do—a book with a lot of pictures of herself, a strong can-do attitude, and a solid core of useful information, a book that would not only be useful but would give her many faithful fans all over the world a glimpse of Joan Crawford’s world. “Your way of life?” I suggested, and her eyes went misty. That was it, exactly, she said, clutching my hand so hard that I feared she might actually break my fingers. Her book should be called My Way of Life, that was exactly the title she had been looking for without knowing it, and I had produced it out of thin air. She could tell that we were going to work well together and do great things. She was never wrong about that kind of thing. Did I like caviar? she asked me. I admitted that I liked it very much indeed, especially with vodka. She clapped her hands together happily. She wanted to know what people liked—really liked—then she would make sure they got it every time they visited her. Mi casa, su casa was her motto—I should feel at home here, always.
I extricated my hand, finished my vodka, and went home a convert. The very next day, I bought Joan’s book, despite Dan Green’s anguished prediction that she would be hell to tour.
Since Crawford’s apartment was on my way home from work, I took to dropping in from time to time to see how the book was going, and, true to her word, there was always caviar for me to have with my Stolichnaya. Every writer has his or her own method of working, of course, but Joan’s was singular and involved, as did much of her life, a certain unreality. She dictated her ideas into a dictating machine, and the tapes were then transcribed and rewritten by her ghostwriter and reappeared neatly typed up in a binder for Joan and me to go over. The only problem was that Joan resolutely denied the existence of the writer and insisted on treating every word of the typescript as if she had typed it herself, improbable as this was, given the perfection of her fingernails. This is not uncommon—lots of celebrities who want to have a book hire a ghostwriter but won’t admit to it—but Joan carried it to extremes. Quite often, the ghost was there, in the apartment, typing away, while Joan went on pretending that the apartment was empty apart from ourselves. While it’s not unusual to conceal the existence of a writer from the public (though I happen to think it’s usually a mistake to hide the fact), it’s almost unknown to hide it from one’s editor. When it comes to their books, most authors have no secrets from their editor, who sees the manuscript, and very often the author, at its worst.
In fact,