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which were contained in a leather-bound loose-leaf binder in which each page was tucked neatly into a transparent plastic cover. This document was, Joan explained, to be “the Bible” for the people in the S&S publicity department who were organizing her tour. It was written in the third person, in an imperious tone of voice, with the more important points underlined. Miss Crawford, I read, must always have a black limousine (not a sedan). The chauffeur must wear a black uniform. He must not smoke in the car or talk to Miss Crawford. I read on. Miss Crawford must have a suite in each hotel along the way. The exact temperature of the suite was specified. The suite was to be provided with the same array of Pepsis and Stolichnaya vodka as she had at home, as well as the exact same placement of cigarette packets and matchbooks. There were to be flowers in each room, in pastel colors (No white flowers!). The refrigerator in the suite was to be stocked with fresh, unopened packets of Ry-Krisps and melba toast, plain cottage cheese, raw carrots and celery sliced lengthwise, on ice. There was to be an ironing board and a steam iron in the suite for the use of Miss Crawford’s faithful German maid (whom she always called, strangely enough, “Mamacita”), and a full hour must be provided before departure to ensure that Miss Crawford’s trunks and hatboxes were downstairs in time and packed into a second vehicle. The hotel manager or assistant manager must be in the lobby to greet Miss Crawford and take her straight to her suite, so she didn’t have to check in.

As the tour began, Joan Crawford of legend reappeared, effacing the image she had created for herself of the calmly efficient, reasonable career woman. She became, to the horror of everybody directly involved in her tour, a star again, in the full meaning of the word.

That, perhaps, was the reason why she wrote the book in the first place, it now occurs to me.

Not long after Joan departed for the hinterlands to sell her book, my wife and I were woken out of a deep sleep late at night by the telephone.

I lifted the receiver and heard the familiar voice of Joan Crawford but raised in decibels to the level of a Boeing 707 leaving the runway. It was, by a strange coincidence, exactly the same level of anger and barely controlled hysteria that I was to hear many years later when I took a call from an unhappy Faye Dunaway, who actually played an angry Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest and got the wire-hanger scene exactly right. “I’m in Cleveland,” Joan howled. “And there are white flowers in my room!”

I’m not sure how I managed to get the situation straightened out. I think I called the night manager and had him replace Joan’s flowers with others. Somehow I got Joan calmed down enough so that she could at least hear my apology, but the truth was that I had been badly shaken. Joan’s voice was the very distillation of female rage.

Years later, I happened to mention Joan’s horror of white flowers to my Auntie Merle. She nodded, as if it made perfect sense. “In Hollywood, white flowers are for funerals,” she said crisply. “Joan knew that better than anyone.”

I told her of Joan’s late-night telephone call to me, and Merle laughed. “Rage was what she did best, that’s all, darling—her specialty, like Fred Astaire’s dancing or Jimmy Stewart’s shyness. You’re lucky to have heard it.”

And I suppose I am.

ONE WRITER who had not followed Gottlieb to Knopf was S. J. Perelman, the sharp-tongued star humorist of The New Yorker, whom I had first met when he was hired by Mike Todd to write the script for Around the World in Eighty Days, for which my father did a good part of the art direction. Like most humorists, Perelman was a misanthropic and embittered man at heart, suspicious, jealous, touchy, and quick to take offense. But he was just about the only writer I know whose manuscripts made me laugh out loud uncontrollably. In person, he was a curious blend of Savile Row and Moskowitz and Lupowitz, a stylishly dressed figure, just short of being a full-fledged dandy, with a rakish little military