Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [176]
She strongly advised having afternoon sex and making men talk about their work. To the question of how a woman could take an interest in her husband’s work if, for example, he was a cashier, Joan suggested asking him (presumably before or during afternoon sex): “Any holdups today?” For those nights when the husband isn’t in, Joan recommended putting on a face mask of mayonnaise or pureed vegetables or a mixture of unflavored gelatin beaten with witch hazel, baking soda, and a raw egg. (At the last suggestion, Evelyn Gendel, the S&S editor who was going over the recipes for me, remarked, “She’s got to be kidding!”) But Joan took it all seriously, from brushing her hair one hundred strokes every night then pulling it hard (which she also did to her daughters until there were tears in their eyes) to teasing a husband out of his bad moods.
Gradually, it dawned on me that Joan’s how-to book was in fact a kind of autobiography, not of the life she had lived but of life as she would like to have lived. All her marriages had been happy, her childhood, despite its up and downs, had been a happy one. Her children were perfect, happy, well adjusted, and loved her; Alfred Steele had been a kind of corporate Prince Charming (though photographs showed a plump, stolid man with an impatient expression, apparently eager to get away from whatever photo-op Joan created to show them as a happy couple). In short, in Dr. Pangloss’s words, “In this best of all possible worlds, all is for the best.” No blemish, however small, was allowed to tarnish this shining picture of perfection. My Way of Life was the equivalent of the kind of historical photographs that were once so common in the Soviet Union, in which all the faces were retouched and everyone who had failed to follow the party line had been carefully painted out.
In some ways, it was as scary a book as I’ve ever read, and the scariest thing was that it worked. In the days before the Cosmo girl, Joan was defining that nebulous ideal of “total femininity,” the woman who knew how to be submissive to her husband, playful in bed, a terrific mother, and a busy, successful working woman. She could cook up a gourmet dinner for ten people at a moment’s notice (in case her hubby brought his board of directors home on a whim), clean spots off the white carpet with her own blend of ammonia and soap, pack the children off to bed happy and clean, study up on the subjects guaranteed to get the dinner party moving in case conversation faltered, clean up after dinner (nothing must ever be left to the next morning), slip into a fabulous negligee that caters to whatever his particular idea of “sexy” is, and get up the next morning to go to work and be a killer competitor. Joan Crawford had no patience at all with women who didn’t want to follow her example and, say, roll a Pepsi bottle around the floor under their instep to make their calves sexier for their husbands while reading the morning paper so as to have something to talk to him about when he comes home at night. Who but Joan Crawford would have instructed her readers to “get their shoulders back where God meant them to be,” or to say “yes” to themselves over and over again in front of the mirror for a more youthful, positive expression?
Long before the book was complete, Joan’s mind had turned to promoting it. She even took me out to her favorite restaurant, “21,” to fill me in on her requirements for the tour,