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Joan Crawford The Essential Biography. Chapter 15

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  Chapter Fifteen
  TEEN IDOL
  
  
  Bette Davis once said of working with Joan on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?:
  
  We were polite to each other - all the social amenities, "Good morning, Joan" and "Good morning, Bette" crap - and thank God we weren't playing roles where we had to like each other! But people forget that our big scenes were alone - just the camera was on me or her. No actresses on earth are as different as we are, all the way down the line. Yet what we do works. It's so strange, this acting business. It comes from inside. She was always so damn proper. She sent thank you notes for thank you notes! I screamed when I found out she signed autographs: "Bless you, Joan Crawford!"
  
   It was Joan's idea to team up with Davis in the film adaptation of Henry Farrell`s novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She approached Davis backstage when the latter was starring on Broadway in Tennessee Williams's play The Night of the Iguana. Baby Jane is about two sisters, both show-business casualties, who live together in a mansion in Hollywood. Jane Hudson (Davis) was once a child star known as "Baby Jane" Hudson, but she failed to make the transition to adult stardom, while her sister Blanche (Joan) became a major movie star. Apparently Jane once ran Blanche over with a car out of jealousy and has cared for her crippled sister ever since. Jane has been exhibiting signs of mental disturbance for years, but two new factors push her over the edge. Her sister's movies are being shown again on television, eliciting fan mail that only reminds her of her envy and failure; and she has learned that Blanche intends to sell the house, take the maid Elvira (Maidie Norman) with her as a companion, and put Jane in a home where she can be looked after. Jane's first actions are relatively benign; planning to revive her career against all odds, she hires a musical accompanist, Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono, who later played "King Tut" on the TV series Batman). Eventually, however, she imprisons Blanche in her room and torments her, murders Elvira when she tries to free Blanche, and finally takes Blanche and flees to the beach, where Jane descends into complete delusion. Before she dies and Jane is taken away by the police, Blanche confesses that she became crippled because she was trying to run over Jane, who had been horrible to her at a party that night, and not the other way around. (The movie also implies that Blanche was motivated by a desire to end Jane's moribund career, which was acting as a drag on Blanche's aspirations.)
  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is an effective enough comic horror movie that gave the two actresses juicy roles. Its examination of the dark side of celebrity is endlessly fascinating, and the picture gets high marks for entertainment value. But while Baby Jane is a better picture than the horror films Joan would do later, it isn't that much better than, say, Strait-Jacket, because its script and characterizations are equally superficial. With its understandable emphasis on grotesque situations, the two women, despite their excellent performances, emerge more as caricatures than as real and sympathetic human beings. One watches without feeling a trace of true pity. Another problem is that Robert Aldrich, who later became an efficient director of "guy films" like The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard, was not exactly a master of suspense, either then or afterward. He fails to achieve the tension crosscutting might have generated on the two occasions that Jane leaves the house only to return at inopportune moments. (Granted, Jane's hammer murder of the maid is very well handled.) And while Baby Jane can comfortably be classified as a black comedy, certain sequences, such as the one in which Edwin Flagg rides around in Blanche's wheelchair, border on the burlesque. It doesn't help that Frank DeVol's musical score is merely serviceable - and sometimes less than serviceable. Jane's reaction to Blanche's climactic revelation - "You mean all this time we could have been friends?" - is surely not meant to be taken literally; had Jane realized that Blanche had been trying to run her over on that fateful evening, she probably would have started her campaign of terror many years earlier or simply left Blanche alone to atrophy and had nothing to do with her.
  Yet Aldrich does add some interesting touches to the movie, such as the way he keeps a light on a portrait of the young Blanche hanging over the very bed where she lies gagged and bound. The casting of Gina Gillespie as young Blanche is inspired, as the girl radiates Joan's own intensity. The opening shot of the movie shows another young girl, neither Blanche nor Jane, crying as a jack-in-the-box, also with tears on its cheeks, pops out and frightens her, perhaps signaling that the story to come is scary and macabre but nothing to take too seriously.
  Whatever reservations she may have had about the story, Joan took her role very seriously, and it shows. Her carefully planned movements make her a believable cripple, and her pantomiming is superb throughout. There is a particularly wonderful bit as she sits in her wheelchair, helpless and hopeless, after Davis throws at her a crumpled note Blanche had thrown out the window in hopes of rescue. Her face beautifully registers her despair and frustration at having her hopes dashed so cruelly. She then wheels herself over to the table where her sister has placed her supper. Tormented by thoughts of what Jane might be serving her now (Jane has already given her a dead pet canary for supper), she can't even find the courage to lift up the cover over the plate. Joan is also excellent during the long sequence in which she struggles to get out of her wheelchair and make her way down the stairs to the first floor, where the telephone is. She calls a doctor and again struggles, this time to make him understand how sick Jane has become and how much danger she is in. There is also a certain poignancy in watching Joan as she watches her much younger self on television (the scenes are from Sadie McKee). She wears a touching expression as she reads the first of the fan mail discarded by Jane but retrieved from the trash by maid Elvira. Bette Davis has the showier role and is wonderful, but Joan matches her the whole way in the quieter part. It was easy for her to be tense, nervous and apprehensive on-screen because that was pretty much the way she felt the entire time she was making the movie. It is baffling that screenwriter Lukas Heller complained that "Crawford never reacted to anything, she sat in her wheelchair or her bed and waited for her close-ups," when that is patently untrue. Perhaps Heller didn't realize that no actress on earth could have made any of his paper-thin characters seem three-dimensional.
  A line of dialogue given to Jane matches Davis's feelings about Joan's career many decades before: "They didn't even want to show my films," Jane says. "They were too busy giving a big build-up to that crap you were turning out." Davis fancied herself an artiste appearing in (or wanting to appear in) "serious" films, while Joan was a mere entertainer churning out divertissements. Whatever the two women thought of each other, they made a good team. For sheer histrionics they are almost matched by Buono`s Edwin Flagg and his slightly daffy Cockney mother, played by Anna Lee.
  
  Another Baby Jane performance of note is that of Maidie Norman, who plays Elvira, Norman had first appeared with Joan in Torch Song in which she played her efficient and understanding secretary with consummate understatement. Her Elvira is a more fundamental creature, a sympathetic soul who won't put up with any of Baby Jane's nonsense and dies horribly for her trouble; Norman makes the most of her scenes. B.D. Merrill, the teenage daughter of Bette Davis and Gary Merrill, played the part of the daughter of the neighbor, Mrs. Bates. She married a man named Jeremy Hyman and betrayed her mother in much the same way that Christina did Joan. From her amateurish performance and unexciting looks, it is easy to see why B.D. never got very far in show business. Christina was hurt, confused, and enraged that Joan didn't secure the part for her (another nail in Joan's coffin), but if Davis was willing to indulge her untalented youngster, Joan certainly wasn't. Besides, at twenty-three Christina was probably too old for the part. Joan never pressured her directors or producers to cast Christina in any of her movies because she felt that she was too inexperienced and that she should make it on her own - just as she herself had.
  While it would perhaps be overstating the case to say that Joan and Bette Davis had a lifelong feud, it must be said that they were never good friends. First there was the fact that Joan had married Franchot Tone, whom Davis had fallen in love with during the filming of Dangerous. Then it was also true that Joan was already a star in major productions when Davis was just doing small roles in forgettable movies. Joan blamed Katherine Albert for The Star (in which the public did not recognize the protagonist as Joan anyway) more than she did Davis. In truth, they did not have much contact with each other until they made Baby Jane. If they did have a feud, it began with this picture. Up until the time of Baby Jane, and for much of the time afterward, Joan and Davis had to deal with their own lives - difficult children, unhappy marriages, careers on the wane, all of the small tasks and burdens that go with a career in show business - and spent little of their time thinking of the other, still less time scheming against one another. "There is no feud," Davis told Hollywood Reporter columnist Mike Connolly. "We wouldn't have one. A man and a woman, yes, but never two women - they'd be too clever for that."
  For all of their similarities, however, Joan and Davis mixed like oil and water. Joan could be "one of the guys" just as much as Davis, but it had to be when she was in the mood, with people she liked. If she didn't feel right, she might give off a "grand dame" vibe. The same was true of Bette Davis, frankly, but Davis at least fancied herself a more down-to-earth sort of person. On Baby Jane, they were both eager to protect their primary investment - themselves. When you consider what both of them had gone through, the battles won and lost, the anxious need to work and stay on top, it is no wonder that neither of them wanted to give an inch. Joan always felt that Aldrich and the publicity department hoped that the two would feud in much the way they had hoped that she and Norma would feud during The Women - because it would be good for business. Joan and Davis didn't exactly feud while making Baby Jane, but there were occasional flare-ups. Now and then Davis might make a crack under her breath, or Joan would lift her head high as if she had to be ever so patient with her cranky and difficult costar.
  So much fiction has sprung up over their relationship during filming of Baby Jane that it is time to put some rumors to rest. Davis would often claim in subsequent interviews that she had contempt for Joan because Joan gave herself the glamour treatment as Blanche, but if she did so, it certainly isn't evidenced by her scenes in the picture. Joan's classic bone structure and lack of grotesque makeup such as Davis used in her characterization of Jane makes her look a lot better than Davis, but she never looks glamorous or wears heavy makeup. Besides, in movies like Strange Cargo Joan had already proved she was willing to go with the scrubbed look if it was in the picture's best interests. Then there is the tale that Davis hauled off and really let Joan have it in the scene in which Jane kicks Blanche all over the floor. This sequence was cleverly edited to make it appear as if Davis's foot was actually striking Joan's body, but in reality there are no shots showing actual contact. When Davis lashes out, the camera is usual focused on her angry facial expression; Joan was nowhere near Davis when these shots were filmed. Finally, there is the delicious canard that Joan hid weights on her body so that Davis would have a hard time lifting her off the bed when she takes her out of the house for their trip to the beach. "Weights!" Joan laughed when asked about this story, "And have Bette tell everyone I was as heavy as an elephant! Absolutely not. I may not have made it as easy for her to lift me out of the bed as I could have, at least at first, but when you're a pro you get over any animosity you may feel and help your fellow player out. It simply didn't happen." It has also been widely reported that Joan told Davis's daughter B.D. Hyman to stay away from her twins so as not to expose them to negative influences, but as the source for this story is Hyman's suspect and ludicrous My Mothers Keeper, its veracity is certainly questionable. If anything, Joan may have been impatient with Hyman's complete lack of acting talent, which may be why Hyman made up the story in the first place.
  Victor Buono remembered that Davis had been quite rude to him during filming (she later apologized for this), while Joan had been just the opposite. Buono recalled:
  
  In the scene when I discover Joan tied up in bed and have to react to seeing her there, Joan had already filmed her part and was about to go home when she found out that my close-ups were being done that afternoon and not the following day. She went back to makeup to get that gaunt, haunted look, put the clothes back on, and get back in the bed, so that I could see her there and have the proper reaction. It wasn't just for the good of the picture; it was to do me a favor. I was nobody and she was "Joan Crawford," and yet she did that for me when no one would have blamed her or criticized her if she'd just gone home as she was supposed to have done. She was a trouper, a real professional, and I thought she was marvelous in the picture.
  
  Clearly this does not square with the image of Joan as a selfish, pampered star only interested in her perks at the expense of others.
  The two women's intense dislike of each other actually began after Baby Jane came out and was a tremendous, unexpected hit. As the budget had not been large to begin with, it earned back its costs almost immediately and went on to make millions of dollars in profit. Joan found herself in very good financial shape, the best since Alfred's death. But she was not thrilled when the Oscar nominations were announced and Davis was nominated and she was not. This did bring out Joan's competitive, "ruthless" side, but there was another reason for the events that followed. Now that she found herself starring in a hit movie that had galvanized the country's attention, she felt like she was once again being invited to the most exciting party in the world, and she wanted to go on feeling like a treasured guest. Bette's Oscar nomination effectively cut her out of the loop, until the Oscar ceremonies themselves helped restore some balance between the two, at least in terms of the attention lavished on each.
  Nobody knows whether Joan actively campaigned against Davis (one tends to suspect it was Davis's paranoia that fueled the story), but she did offer to accept the award on behalf of any Best Actress nominee who could not be in attendance. The now legendary sequence of events had Joan "graciously" holding court backstage at the Oscars. Davis was in a good, conciliatory mood - after all, she had been nominated and Joan had not - and the two were quite friendly for much of the evening. But then the winner was announced and Davis went almost literally into shock. Everyone was certain that Davis would walk off with the award but then it went to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker instead. Joan brushed past Davis, went on stage, and accepted the Oscar for Bancroft. Now it was Joan who was in the limelight and Davis who was suddenly ejected from the fabulous party.
  Did Joan revel over this development? Of course she did, as she admitted many times over the years. Joan was only human. Davis had made it clear on more than one occasion that she thought she was much more talented than Joan, who understandably resented such remarks bitterly. To have her rival humbled was sweet indeed. Joan never denied that she thought Davis had talent and was a great star, but she also felt that Davis was in no position to condescend to her, and she was right about that.
  Although Joan had given somewhat mannered performances in some early and mid-career assignments, in her later years she was actually a much more "natural" performer than Davis. Joan's post- Baby Jane performances betray none of the affected posturing and vocal tics that bedeviled Davis in her final films. Splitting all of her sentences into three distinct parts and assuming dreadful high-pitched voices and prima-donna attitudes, Davis generally descended to the level of the script while Joan tended to tower over her material.
  
  A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine had the last word on the Bette and Joan combo. It shows two women looking up at a movie theater marquee presenting What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? "I like Bette Davis," one woman says to her friend. "And I like Joan Crawford. But I don't think I'd like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford together."
  Still, with the grosses of Baby Jane still ringing in the actresses' cars, and the realization that this cheap horror picture had won them a whole new generation of fans and made them stars again, Joan and Bette would decide to try it all over again.
  Joan made the unfortunate decision to take a supporting part in Hall Barlett's production of The Caretakers (Bartlett also directed and cowrote this mess) because she liked Bartlett and some of his previous film work. She thought the part of Lucretia might be juicy, and she found the subject matter intriguing. The script went through many changes both before and during filming, which may explain the shoddy results, or it may be that, anxious to work, Joan never examined the initial screenplay carefully enough.
  In The Caretakers (1963), Joan played Lucretia Terry, head nurse at the Canterbury mental hospital. Her main adversary is Dr. Donovan McCloud (Robert Stack), who runs a "borderline" therapy group in an attempt to reach patients Lucretia thinks are too dangerous and should be isolated from the rest. Said patients include Marion (Janis Paige), whose "illness" appears to be nymphomania; Lorna (Polly Bergen), who has suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of her son in a car accident that took place while she was driving; and Edna (Barbara Barrie), who for some reason refuses to speak to anyone.
  Unfortunately, the sensationalistic, exploitative and dated approach to the material (there's no mention of drug therapy for the patients, for instance) dilutes the drama and poignancy of the story. A lot of The Caretakers plays like improvisational theater in a high-school drama club. The movie is pretty dull until Joan shows up half an hour into the proceedings. In fact, The Caretakers only comes alive when she's on screen. (Mirroring this, the crew applauded when Joan showed up on the set.) Highly artificial and full of dime-store psychology, the movie only succeeds in making the viewer believe that Lucretia is probably on the right track - especially after Barbara Barrie sets the curtains on fire. The movie is a far cry from Possessed.
  The Caretakers was shot by talented cinematographer Lucien Ballard, but Joan, billed fourth (after Stack, Bergen, and, as another nurse, Diane McBain), looks a bit haggard; her hairstyle, too youthful despite its silvered effect, only underlines her aged appearance. But Joan plays with her usual fire and passion, especially when Lucretia confronts Dr. McCloud, who she feels is hopelessly naive about their deeply disturbed charges. She's very commanding in these scenes, but never overplays to the point where she becomes some kind of dragon lady; rather, she comes off as a woman who is powerfully committed to her beliefs. Handsome Dr. Denning (Van Williams) rightly observes that Lucretia is the toughest kind of opponent because she "honestly believes she's right." Whatever the ravages of time and alcohol had done to her face, Crawford's figure was still smashing, as she demonstrates in the scene in which she puts on black leotards and gives her nurses lessons in judo.
  In the original script, Joan was supposed to go stark raving mad after being rejected by her lover - which would have been another idiotic moment in a picture filled with same. She was then to wind up as one of kindly Dr. McCloud's patients instead of being locked up in a ward. Joan insisted that the sequence was shot and was (mercifully) dropped from the final cut. (Joan would get to do a mad scene in her next picture anyway.) Bartlett told her that several scenes were dropped because they only cheapened her character. "Every woman who's rejected by the man she loves looks cheap," she replied.
  Joan was delighted to be working with Herbert Marshall, who had a supporting role as Dr. Harrington. Like Joan, Marshall was a Hollywood veteran who understood the importance of professionalism. Marshall, who had a wooden leg, was rather feeble at this time in his life, and was drinking heavily as well, so he is always seen seated behind a desk. Despite the fatigue he registers, he plays very well with Joan and retains his excellent delivery, always with that impish twinkle in his eye. When Dr. Harrington and Lucretia discuss Dr. McCloud and his methods, with Dr. Harrington remarking that Dr. McCloud in some ways reminds him of his younger self, the magic of these two old pros working together almost fools the viewer into thinking that he's seeing a good movie. Realizing how sick Marshall was, and in part identifying with this fallen giant of Old Hollywood, Joan insisted that Bartlett film his close-ups before hers in their scenes together so that he could leave as quickly as possible.
  When she wasn't chatting with Marshall, Joan was eyeing Van Williams, whom she found "delectable." She said of Williams, "In the old studio star system that boy would have been given quite a build-up." Williams would later star in the short-lived TV series The Green Hornet. Joan also had quite a crush on Robert Stack, who did not reciprocate her feelings. She was less charitable in her opinions of Janis Paige ("well-cast") and Diane McBain, both the kind of pretty, rising starlet that she found threatening and generally not very professional. She had little to do with Polly Bergen, who'd already been in many movies and, as a protegee of Alfred Steele, had appeared in ads for Pepsi. During a break in shooting, Joan took Bartlett via limo to the famous Pickfair, where he was introduced to certain members of Hollywood's old guard, including Mary Pickford. Pickford greeted Joan warmly.
  It was around the time of the release of The Caretakers that Joan learned that her brother Hal had died of complications to appendicitis. After two failed marriages, Hal had lived with his mother for many years. It is unknown whether Joan supported him for a while after their mother died, but she probably sent him money from time to time. If she did, it was more out of pity than out of love. She could never forgive Hal's attempts to extort money from her, his threats to talk to reporters about her early promiscuous years or her relationship to Harry Cassin. Hal had become a drunk, which made him even more impossible to deal with. Joan cut off all contact with him. Eventually Hal got a job as night clerk at a hotel and joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Joan did not attend his funeral. "My brother died for me a long, long time before 1963," she remembered. She admitted to many interviewers that Hal had been so mean to her in childhood and throughout her life that she literally hated him. "Hal thought because he was a man he was better than any woman, yet he lived off and used women - and other men - all of his life. He never appreciated anything I ever tried to do for him. I don't think anyone was ever more vicious to me than he was."
  Joan Blondell was to have been the star of Strait-Jacket - it is certainly interesting to contemplate Blondell in the part of the axe murderess - but she had an accident before filming began, and director-producer William Castle needed someone else in a hurry. Castle was well-known for the cheap but often inventive horror films that he dashed out with alarming regularity. It stuck in his craw that Alfred Hitchcock had invaded his territory and made a cheap black-and-white horror film, Psycho, to huge publicity and acclaim. From then on, Castle made it his business to try to outdo Psycho with an even more attention-getting picture. His first attempt was a nifty Psycho imitation entitled Homicidal, which was no work of art but had its moments. Now he hired Robert Bloch, who had authored the novel on which Psycho was based, to write a script for a new shocker entitled Strait-Jacket. If knifings in the shower got the public's attention, Castle figured, juicy ax murders ought to make him a million. The ad copy screamed: "Warning! Strait-Jacket Realistically Depicts Ax Murders!"
  In the '50s, Castle's major motion-picture star had been Vincent Price, at the beginning of his horror cycle, which he completed with Roger Corman and increasingly less-established filmmakers. For Castle, Price had starred in such popular, amusing and well-received (by teens, anyway) thrillers as House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler. Now Castle had an even bigger and more prestigious star, Joan Crawford, and he had no intention of letting her go. Joan agreed to do Strait-Jacket because of her $50,000 fee and because Castle agreed to the rest of her demands. Castle came on to her like a sycophant, and guaranteed that she'd get the full star treatment - if not a lot of glamour.
  
  In Strait-Jacket (1964), Joan was cast as Lucy Harbin, a hot tamale who comes home late one night to find her hunky husband in bed with a local tramp. Outraged, Lucy picks up an ax and chops the two to bits, as her little daughter looks on. Twenty years later, Lucy is released from a mental institution and arrives at the home of her brother Bill (Leif Ericson) and his wife Emily (Rochelle Hudson), where Lucy's daughter Carol (Diane Baker) has been living. Lucy has some problems adjusting to her new life, and Dr. Anderson (Mitchell Cox), who is tending to Lucy's well-being, suggests he accompany her back to the sanitarium. Shortly afterward, he is attacked by an ax-wielding assailant. The chop-chop routine continues on blackmailing hired hand Leo Krause (George Kennedy), and the father of Carol's fiancé.
  It turns out that Carol has committed these new murders, in the hopes that her mother will be blamed, because she knows that the parents of her fiancé will never let them get married. Although the entirely different tone and overall approach help to disguise the fact, the basic premise of the film is taken from The ABC Murders, by Agatha Christie. In that classic novel, the killer murders a series of people to try to create the illusion of a maniac on the loose so that the murder of his intended victim will not point back to him. The most imaginative part of Strait-Jacket comes at the very end of the film - the lady in the Columbia logo is missing her head!
  While it isn't necessarily "great" acting, Joan gives a very compelling and commanding performance in Straight-Jacket, never descending to the level of the material. Wisely eschewing the glamour treatment except when the script calls for it, she gives a very convincing portrait of a woman who's been out of society - and in a very bad place - for a long time. When she enters her brother's home and is about to see her daughter for the first time in twenty years, she conveys all of the apprehension, guilt, need, hope, and regret that anybody would feel in such a situation. She is also splendid in the sequence in which she and her daughter wait for the girl's boyfriend to arrive, moving adeptly from anxiety and insecurity over meeting him to the sloppy way she puts the make on the young man once he finally shows up. Another good moment occurs when she watches Leo butcher a fowl while she holds an ax, trembling and screaming as the horrible memories rush through her. Her performance is also shrewd enough never to give away her ultimate guilt or innocence to the audience. There is also quite a transformation from the younger, cheap Lucy we see at the opening to the aged, gray, somber woman she becomes twenty years later.
  Straight-Jacket is undeniably schlocky, but it is also quite entertaining and effective; while no means on the level of Joan's greatest pictures, it actually seems to improve with age. The murder of Leo, as he stares at the headless body of Dr. Anderson stuffed into the meat locker, is superbly handled for maximum suspense, probably because it was filmed just as Bloch wrote it. The picture cries out for a musical score that doesn't sink so many scenes, and the conclusion is unfortunately pat and perfunctory. Diane Baker's sweetness nicely hides her devious, psychotic nature; Joan thought a lot of the actress, who had also been in The Best of Everything and would later appear with her in Fatal Confinement, a television production. Joan was also taken with the good looks of John Anthony Hayes, who played her daughter's fiancé Michael. When someone commented, not disparagingly, that he did his acting with his lips, Joan murmured, "Yes, and such sexy lips, too." For a lark and some added publicity, Pepsi-Cola vice president (and good friend of the late Alfred Steele) Mitchell Cox played Dr. Anderson with amateurish sincerity. The bust that Carol has sculpted of Lucy was actually done by artist Yucca Salamunich on the set of A Woman's Face in 1941.
  Joan went the extra mile to do publicity for the film - literally: she toured several cities in the United States and Canada over two weeks for personal appearances in theaters of the Loew's movie-theater chain. Dorothy Kilgallen would sit with her on the stage and interview her. Joan had no shame for her performance in the film, which she knew was vivid and vital and as true-to-life as the movie deserved, but she also recognized that the audience was not exactly seeing her at her best. Strait-Jacket was not Mildred Pierce, after all. She fortified herself with vodka and went out to face the fans, gratified to see that there were so many and that they were of all different ages. Of course, many of the teens only came to see somebody being beheaded (as the advertisements promised) and couldn't have cared less about Joan. Still, even they got a casual thrill out of seeing the picture's formidable star in person.
  Joan was treated like a queen every step of the way, down to the brand of vodka and other spirits awaiting her in each hotel suite, and the limousine waiting to pick her up at each airport. Some ridiculed Joan when these extensive lists made their way into the hands of the press, but her demands were no different from those of many other stars of the period, and indeed less extreme than the demands of many of the highly overpaid stars of today.
  Joan had proven many times over that she could handle just about anything that was thrown at her. But her next film assignment would prove too much of a challenge, even for her.
  
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