Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [175]
Joan, however, was rather proud of being a disciplinarian and boasted that she had made her children take a nap every day, even though they hated it as they grew older. Not many women noted with pride, as she did, that they made their children stand on a stool at the sink at the end of every day to “wash out their shoelaces and polish their little white shoes before putting them away.” Needless to say, the little white shoelaces had to be removed from the little white shoes first, then washed until they were spotless, laid flat so they dried unwrinkled, and put back into the shoes when they were dry in exactly the right pattern—not crisscrossed. Seen as a task for, say, a tired six-year-old, this seemed to me to approach cruelty, but Joan felt that she was merely giving her children the benefit of her own harsh upbringing and that it would make stronger persons of them. The children were taught to ignore any weakness and be perfect at all times. Although Cathy had an allergy to horses, she was made to take regular riding lessons, with her eyes streaming and her face swollen. “I was strict when I thought it was necessary” was all Joan could be made to say on the subject. She saw herself as the perfect mother, and that was that.
Her view of children was perhaps best defined by the paintings in her bedroom: Margaret Keane portraits of children, sorrowful waifs with huge, sad, dark eyes that seemed to follow one around the room. Her choice in art was at once mundane and bizarre—enough so to have caused a famous scene when the director Jean Negulesco criticized her “lousy taste” in art before the entire cast of The Best of Everything, sending Joan into a rare burst of tears. Pride of place in Joan’s living room was held by a large, three-quarter-length painting of herself wearing a clinging silver evening dress that left her shoulders bared and was cut so low in front that most of her breasts were revealed. It showed her, very oddly, with the face of a mature woman and the lush, nubile figure of a nineteen-year-old Playboy centerfold. Was this the way she saw herself? If so—and it certainly seemed to be, for she was determined to put the painting on the cover of the book—it was another piece of self-delusion, like her notion of herself as a good mother, offering tips on child rearing to other women, or her belief that she had brought the children up in an ordinary happy family, despite her four marriages and the fact that the children were always being made to pretend, against the threat of dire punishment, that the current man in their mother’s life was their loving daddy.
In other ways, too, Joan’s manuscript came increasingly to represent what she had wanted her life to be and bore less and less resemblance to the truth—or, at any rate, to the known facts. She described in detail how hard she had to work to juggle “film offers,” despite the fact that she had not had such an offer in a very long time. She noted how hard-pressed she was to cope with the constant demands on her time by Pepsi-Cola, although the Pepsi people had been trying to get her off their backs ever since Steele’s death.
Her recipes for a happy marriage were equally strange, particularly as they came from somebody who had three divorces to her credit. She recommended a blood-sugar pick-me-up for husbands, served at drink time, consisting of peanut butter and bacon on black bread cooked in a grill until it sizzled. Her cooking—she was inordinately proud of her ability as a cook, though the only time she served me