Joan Crawford Reads "My Way of Life" Audio Book

Thanks!

Thanks, OP! I don't have five hours now, but I intend to check this out in the next day or so.

I look forward to hearing the tone in Joan's voice when she describes the fascinating people - but no hippies - she invites to her parties. Also, when she describes the meatloaf with hard-boiled eggs in it. I hope both of those are included.

God, the delusions!!!

At 47:22, Joan compares herself to a Christmas gift

"Like all marvellous things, she should come in a lovely wrapping..."

Im a little over two hours in, and geeze. What a diluted, phony accented, name dropping, self serving, bitch! Its mesmerizing to listen to. I love Joan. She is an outright loon. She firmly believes all of it. Trying so hard to conceal her trashy upbringing. Bless you Joan.

I am glad you guys are enjoying this as much as I am

I had to laugh at the 20,000 people waiting for her in Zanzibar!

Joan approaches everything as if it was a role, even her husbands and kids.

She keeps repeating how much she loves life and not being bitter, etc. Well, she clearly hated life and was super bitter

R5 She was diluted? I was hoping for a concentrated dose of Crawford.

She had a rough upbringing which included sexual abuse by a step-dad. She invented and reinvented herself starting in her teens. She had no examples of what healthy relationships were or what trust was. She made a lot of mistakes and had her priorities out of order for much of her life, but I cut her some slack because of her background.

She was playing a character named Joan Crawford and was serving her public what she thought they wanted.

Chill those salad plates!

Joan pronounces Buffet as Bouffay

I love when she "flies to her desk"......I picture her on a broom!

Joan is probably the most superficial person I've ever listened to

What a shallow existence

Joan says @ 2:02:31: maybe he'll be too tired that night and maybe he'll get raped

0_0

I know this is an old thread, but listening to Miss Crawford read her book, with her hilarious pronunciation of French is GOLD. Poor Joanie, she worked all her life to be her best. I wonder if she ever made peace with her early past.

"Christina decided to become an actress- and she's a damned good one. She'll be heard from more and more."

I remember reading this book as a young gayling in 1975 and thinking "Then why have I never heard of Christina Crawford"?

Love Joan, I hope this made her enough money to live out her last few years in comfort.

R10, so did an aging QUEEN waiter at Chardays , or whatever, in Wilton Manors.

[quote]...she was crushed when she saw the published article. "They didn't put in any pictures of my books, my friends!" she despaired. "You'd think I didn't have any library at all; doesn't that bother you, Carl? And my porcelains! Not one photograph!" She was proud of her white Kuan-Yin porcelains, which she'd collected over the years, and had made sure that they were included in some of the photographs. She was upset that the only full-page picture was a close-up of Michaele Vollbracht's portrait of her, which actually hid behind a tree in the bedroom, and that they had singled out a picture of the Salamunich bronze bust of her which was, I knew, barely visible behind some greenery in the living room. What bothered her was that the inclusion of these self-images made the apartment look like an ego-trip, and it was not.

[quote]"Anyway," she finally admitted to me, "it looks like I live in some nouveau-riche efficiency apartment in Queens, or some goddam place and I feel like throwing everything out and starting over!" She was near tears. "I can just hear what those people in California are going to say when they see it: 'Jesus Christ, is that the way she has to live now?'"...

[quote]In fact, no one could accuse Joan Crawford of having superb decorating taste, but it is also true that the apartment was much more comfortable and welcoming than the pictures indicated. Yes, she did put plastic covers on the overstuffed furniture, but not all the time, and no, you did not have to remove your shoes to protect the white carpeting, because she'd done away with all that years ago and preferred polished parquet. The furniture, a mix of sleek Parsons tables, vaguely Oriental knickknacks and occasional pieces, with large dollops of "Hollywood Moderne," would horrify Bloomingdale's generation, but I always thought that it suited her. Joan Crawford was Hollywood Moderne. Both of the apartments she lived in on Sixty-ninth Street were bright and airy, and I always felt comfortable in them. The paintings wouldn't win any awards, either, whether they were garishly colored Jamaican primitives, or those bug-eyed portraits by Margaret Keane, but Joan honestly defended them. She used to say that each had a particular meaning to her, whether she'd had them since the 1930s, or because she and Alfred Steele had purchased them on one of the many business trips they took for Pepsi in the 1950s. "You don't have to live with them; I do," she would state flatly, "and they make me happy."

I feel a tremendous sympathy for Joan. She raised herself up from nothing, grabbed stardom, and never let go. I would have liked to be her friend. What a broad!

She's a busy bee, that Miss Crawford!

Dance, Fools, Dance!

'The Unknown', a very perverse silent film with Lon Chaney, Sr. Most people don't realize she transitioned all the way from silent films to television movies.

I like to think that if the Food Network had been around in the 1970s, she would have had her own cooking show. "Next week, I will be presenting my acclaimed meat loaf, which has a syuper surprise inside when you cut it to serve your guests at your next elegant swaraaay."

How does one woman manage to have it all?

OP, thanks! Having this to listen to might actually prompt me to do housework.

This book was an inspiration!

Thank you, r18. That’s interesting and gives us the other side of the story.

Question: How did we get the audio? It was to be a phonograph record? Weren’t audiobooks a few years later?

R27

Its a record set of her book for the blind. As Miss Crawford once stated; She always spoke as clear as she could in her films so her blind fans could enjoy the movie too. I think she said that when she was doing press for "TORCH SONG" as it had a blind character.

I want to listen to Faye's "My Way of Life" too.

crawfords audio book reading aligns with her daughters memoir, joan sounds drunk, demanding and competitive.

Why the move to NYC?

R31, I believe it was to help support Alfred Steele in his role as Chairman of the Board of Pepsi-Cola. Her story in NYC is rather sad. She had a large apartment in Imperial House, but as her finances became wizened, she had to move into another apartment, half its size. Once she was ousted from the board of Pepsi-Cola, her budget was cut, rather drastically. She took pretty much any work that was offered, but the offers had been dying out for years. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur. She never liked the name 'Joan Crawford'. The studio named her that, in a contest. She thought 'Crawford' was too reminiscent of 'crawfish' (actually, probably 'crawdad', which is what working class Americans call them). The thought of her putting herself out there, day after day, not ever being able to use her real name, is sort of haunting to me. She's portrayed as some kind of dragon lady, but she was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, at one time, and she actually had a knack for comedy, when she was cast that way.

Some actors who live under a stage name says it's caused them some identity conflicts, but I can't imagine that was true of our Joanie. She shed her past as much as a human being can, and once she'd established a new identity, I can imagine she actively enjoyed having a new name, and never hearing the name her awful family ever screamed at her again.

And yes, I adore this audiobook! Reading the words on the page just doesn't give you the impact of her accentless, trained, projected, modulated, utterly artificial speaking voice!

[quote]which has a syuper surprise inside when you cut it to serve your guests at your next elegant swaraaay."

A red or green weirdo?