“If they want to see the girl next door, let them go next door.”
Joan Crawford’s life encompassed several periods of fame/infamy: her early starlet years; her biting, witty cougar period; her brief blue-blood moment as the heir to the Pepsi fortune; and her posthumous reinvention (courtesy of her daughter Christina) as the worst mother in the lower forty-eight. The last phase, sadly, became the most enduring, thanks to camp biopic Mommie Dearest (1981) and its signature line: “No more wire hangers!” Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Crawford debuted on Broadway in 1924 and landed a contract with MGM later that year. Her stage name was chosen in a magazine contest sponsored by the studio. A constant presence in dance contests around Los Angeles throughout the late twenties, she would spend much of the next decade as one of the top box-office draws in Hollywood. Her best known early films are Grand Hotel (1932) and The Women (1939). By the early 1940s, however, she had come to be considered box-office poison. She scored several major comebacks: an Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce (1945), the Academy-Award nominated Possessed (1947) and Sudden Fear (1952), and her unforgettable turn opposite longtime rival Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Crawford left Hollywood respected as a tireless professional and, despite a posthumous image as an abusive mother, remains one of the true stars of her time.
THERE WOULD BE a few requests forthcoming, but know this: “Miss Crawford is a star in every sense of the word,” the document read. “You do not have to make empty gestures to prove to Miss Crawford that she is a star of the first magnitude.”
In 1964, Joan Crawford’s film career had been sputtering for a couple of years. The brilliant Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was her last major role. She continued to work, but her recent movies had been campy horror thrillers aiming to capitalize on Baby Jane. For one strange gig, she actually replaced her daughter Christina, thirty-five years her junior, on four episodes of a soap opera (The Secret Storm) while Christina was on sick leave. The event would make it into Mommie Dearest.
And so, with her movie career stumbling toward self-parody, Crawford focused on her responsibilities as a global representative and board member of Pepsi Cola, the company at which her late husband, Alfred Steele, had climbed to the rank of CEO before his death in 1959. This meant a lot of traveling. And wherever Crawford went, she took “The Document” with her—a set of instructions sent to hotels in advance that outlined her demands as a privileged guest and her guidelines for hotel staff behavior.
To wit: Ms. Crawford required a three-bedroom suite: one room for her, one for her personal maid, and one for her wardrobe. She required two rooms for the pilots of the Pepsi corporate jet. She required a uniformed security officer outside her suite twenty-four hours a day, someone “from Pinkerton or a similar organization”; city policemen and hotel detectives were unacceptable. And she required that the staff be prepared to handle twenty-eight pieces of luggage (not twenty-nine, not twenty-seven, but twenty-eight exactly). These twenty-eight pieces of luggage contained, among many other things, an ungodly number of shoes, several picnic hampers, a large supply of liquor, and an ax with a three-foot haft.
These twenty-eight pieces of luggage contained, among many other things, an ungodly number of shoes, several picnic hampers, a large supply of liquor, and an ax with a three-foot haft.
Try not to get hung up on the ax; notice instead the part where it says she traveled with her own supply of liquor. Was the idea that, out of discretion, Crawford brought her own booze with her? Apparently not, because “The Document” went on to outline her additional alcohol requirements: “Two fifths of Smirnoff 100-proof vodka. One fifth Old Forester bourbon. One fifth Chivas Regal scotch. One fifth Beefeater gin. And two bottles Moët & Chandon champagne.” And she would need a whole new set for each stop of her travels.
After Steele’s death—especially during the filming of Baby Jane, when drinking was practically part of the production schedule—Crawford’s intake had reached new heights. And now it seemed she had figured out a way to put it all on the Pepsi tab. It worked for a solid decade, though not without ever-increasing protests from her husband’s replacement, Donald Kendall, whom she playfully nicknamed “Fang.”
In 1970, on the exact day that Crawford reached the mandatory retirement age of 65, Fang announced her retirement. She would learn about it in what was an altogether different kind of document, the newspaper—it was the end of a remarkable run.
WHEN EMPEROR MICHAEL ROMANOFF first arrived in Los Angeles, his royal bloodline was kept a secret. He was just the lowly grandson of British prime minister William Gladstone. Or so he told people. But at some point, Romanoff admitted the truth: he was, in fact, the nephew of Czar Nicholas II, an emperor by lineage, in hiding under a fake name by necessity.
In short order, Romanoff became a trusted business partner and friend to some of the industry’s biggest players. But the peculiar thing about this arrangement was that every single one of his new and powerful friends also knew that he was a complete and utter fraud—that the Emperor was, in fact, a two-bit hustler with seventeen (known) aliases. And yet they still did business with the guy. It seemed to make no sense. Or did it?
Born Hershel Geguzin (possibly) in Lithuania (or else Brooklyn), the future Michael Romanoff was such a notorious scam artist that the New Yorker had already published a five-part feature detailing his numerous schemes and fabrications before he had even arrived in Los Angeles. But everyone who met him in Hollywood found themselves in surprised agreement: Romanoff was a charming and worldly gentleman, never mind who he actually was.
So when Romanoff set his sights on opening a restaurant in the heart of Beverly Hills, investors readily demonstrated their trust in his business savvy. Charlie Chaplin, Robert Benchley, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Darryl F. Zanuck, John Hay “Jock” Whitney—each ponied up $7,500 to the known con man. And Romanoff rewarded their trust not by absconding with their money, but by actually opening the restaurant, Romanoff’s, on Rodeo Drive—and turning it into one of the most successful and renowned eateries of all time.
To discuss the food he served would be to miss the point entirely. Romanoff himself refused to pray at the altar of the celebrity chef or even acknowledge that it existed. “A restaurant,” he said, “is only as good as its owner’s personality.” He wanted people to pray at the altar of him. And soon enough, they did.
Romanoff derived his power quite brilliantly—from the building’s floor plan. The front room was reserved for his most favored patrons, the best of the best. (Bogart practically took up residence.) And to get anywhere else in the building, you had to walk through this VIP room. Which meant that lesser celebrities (and all civilians) suffered the indignity of marching through the VIP room before being seated in the large, steerage-seeming dining room. It was excruciating. The worst part: If you walked through, you were forced to watch your more successful peers watching you. Try turning that into confidence back on set.
The system gave Romanoff a perversely large amount of power in Hollywood. Not a businessman or army-general’s type of power, better: He created perceptions of status in an industry built on perception. Romanoff had, by force of will, built a tiny kingdom in which he became the actual emperor.
And maybe this is what explains the town’s genuine affection for the man who’s real name was Hershel Geguzin; they understood his con in a deep and primal way. Just like a movie star, Emperor Romanoff was pursuing an exaggerated version of the American Dream, of the idea that a boy from the Ukraine whose highest previous station was pressing men’s pants could convince people that he was royalty, that he was an emperor—and then become one.