"Few Hollywood careers have been more fabulous, more scandalous, more dizzyingly from-rags-to-riches and from-triumph-to-tragedy, more glaringly limelit than that of Joan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1906 (or 1908, according to her press releases) in Texas. Miss Crawford rose from being a telephone operator in Kansas City (under the name Billie Cassin, since her mother had remarried) to a chorus line in Springfield, Missouri. and from there--as if propelled by one high, miraculous kick--came to MGM, fame, glamour, glitter, romance, and ultimate stardom. For many people Joan Crawford was more than a star; she was *the* star, the very symbol of those dazzling movie queens whose faces were more famous throughout the world than those of emperors, dictators or presidents, and whose very appearance could create a riot--as Miss Crawford once did in New York`s Grand Central Terminal. She was a tough, ambitious, gutsy and fiercely competitive person, a complete professional when it came to making movies, a star on or off the stage. Her energy was inexhaustible and legendary, as was her temper, and her marriages were stormy and violent, whether with fellow-star Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. or with Pepsi-Cola executive Alfred Steele, who made her Pepsi's ambassador to the world and died leaving her almost penniless. Joan Crawford's love affairs were the stuff of countless gossip columns, as widely publicized as her movies--and seldom indeed has a life been lived more in the limelight of publicity. Yet in this definitive, powerful and dramatic biography, Bob Thomas, dean of Hollywood biographers, has recreated the *real* life of Joan Crawford: her lonely, terrible death; her search for her father (who abandoned her at an early age and reappeared in her life when she was a star); her struggles to reach the top; the scandals that haunted her life (including the rumor that she had appeared in a blue movie and that Louis B. Mayer had paid a king's ransom to buy the negative and destroy it); her tortured relationships with her adopted children; her drinking; and her courageous decision to resume work after Steele's death. Here, at last, is the complete and extraordinary story of Joan Crawford's life, her films, her marriages, her secrets and her loves, in an intimate biography that delineates the character and the personality of the Ultimate Star."--Dust jacket.