Photo: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Joan Crawford's Pepsi Years
From a girl who couldn't afford the bus fare to Pepsi's globe-trotting First Lady. Twenty years, 100,000 miles, and fifteen suitcases (at least)
In the poverty-stricken early days she could not afford the fare. Then she married the president of Pepsi-Cola and spent twenty years crossing the globe on the company's dime, from Baghdad and the Belgian Congo to Kenya and Cape Town. Fifteen suitcases in tow (at least), a Pinkerton guard at the door, a case of Pepsi chilling in the suite. The girl who once couldn't scrape together a bus fare now travelled like the crowned head of a small and extremely glamorous nation. Here is where Joan went, and how you can follow her.
Darling, Joan. Few actresses ever worked harder to become a star, and then worked even harder once they had.
Travel came to Joan's life relatively late. In her poverty-stricken early days, when she was still Lucille LeSueur from San Antonio, there was no money for it, and once MGM had turned her into Joan Crawford there was no time. It took a fourth marriage, at the age of forty-nine, to finally send her around the world. In 1955 she married Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi-Cola, and spent the next twenty years opening bottling plants and cutting ribbons from Baghdad to Uganda. By her own estimate she covered more than 100,000 miles for Pepsi, and she did it in the grandest manner: fifteen pieces of luggage (at least), a full bar (including two bottles of Dom Perignon) and a case of Pepsi waiting in the suite, and a Pinkerton guard outside the door, because a local policeman simply would not do.
Her rider - the list of demands a touring star sends ahead so that everything is exactly so before she arrives - was a document of some ambition. When Life magazine gleefully got hold of it, it signed off with the reminder that Miss Crawford was "a star of the first magnitude." Nobody who met her on the road was left in any doubt.
So what was she actually doing in Baghdad and Milan and Tulsa? Steele was building Pepsi through a web of independent local bottlers, and every new factory needed a grand opening, so Joan supplied one: she would cut the ribbon, tour the line, hold a press conference, and host a cocktail party for the local franchisee and the assembled worthies of the town. Abroad, where much of the business was done at government level, her pull was greater still. "At those high levels," Steele told Time in 1957, "Crawford is fabulous." Here is where Joan went, and how you can follow her.
Elope at the Flamingo, Las Vegas
Start where she did. On 10 May 1955, in the penthouse of the Flamingo, the hotel Bugsy Siegel built. Joan married Steele on the spur of the moment, a judge officiating rather than a chapel. The Flamingo is bigger and brasher now than the desert glamour palace of 1955, but it still stands on the Strip, and a room there remains the most Joan Crawford way to begin a Las Vegas weekend.
Honeymoon in Rome, dine in Paris
Joan and Alfred's honeymoon set the template for their whole marriage: grand hotels, grand meals, and business never far behind. In Paris a supper party was thrown in the couple's honour at Maxim's, then regarded as the most famous restaurant in the world. The Belle Époque landmark on the rue Royale was fully restored and reopened in late 2024, so you can once again dine beneath its stained glass and gilded mirrors as she did. In Rome they checked into the Hotel Hassler at the top of the Spanish Steps, still one of the most romantic addresses in the city, and still crowned by a rooftop restaurant with one of the finest views in Rome.
Go on safari like a movie queen
The grandest of her Pepsi expeditions was the 1957 tour through the Middle East and Africa, and its richest surviving stop is Treetops, the tree-house lodge in Kenya's Aberdare forest. This is where the young Princess Elizabeth spent a night in 1952 and came down the next morning a queen, and Joan was as smitten with it as everyone else. "Way out there in the wilderness," she said, "it's one of the most luxurious places in the world," rating its food against 21 in New York, which was her favourite restaurant on earth. (21 has been closed since 2020; Treetops, happily, reopened fully restored in 2024.) One evening a herd of elephants came to the floodlit waterhole at dusk. "It was an awesome sight," she remembered, "as we sat there in candlelight, almost holding our breath." Book a room facing the waterhole.
" "Way out there in the wilderness, it's one of the most luxurious places in the world."
Take afternoon tea at the Pink Lady, Cape Town
In South Africa she checked into the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the grande dame beneath Table Mountain that has been painted its unmistakable shade since 1918 and known ever since as the Pink Lady. Its afternoon tea, served under the palms, is an institution in its own right, and the most gracious way imaginable to spend a Cape Town afternoon exactly as she did.
Check into the grand hotels of the American tour
Back home, Pepsi kept her moving through a circuit of the finest hotels in America, and the best of them are all still open. In San Francisco she returned again and again to the Fairmont atop Nob Hill. Every spring she flew to Honolulu for a Pepsi cookout and stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on Waikiki, where a cocktail on the beach is always the correct order. In San Diego she favoured the red-turreted Hotel del Coronado across the bay, and in Miami Beach the Fontainebleau, the splashiest hotel in Florida then and arguably now. In Washington she held court at The Mayflower, and in Tulsa at the art deco Mayo, abandoned for decades and beautifully restored in 2009. Any one of them will put you in a suite worthy of Joan's rider.
Time an Italian summer around the Giro
Italy hosted Joan more than once. In 1961 she settled in Milan at the Hotel Principe di Savoia, still the city's most palatial address, and timed her visit to the Giro d'Italia, the great national cycling race she watched there that June. Do the same, checking the route for the year you travel, and you can follow a stage of the race before retreating to a marble bathroom she would no doubt thoroughly have approved of.
Where you can't follow her
Not all of Joan's journeys can be easily retraced, and there is a romance in that too. The 1957 tour that took her to Kenya and Cape Town also ran her through the Middle East, sailing from Italy to Beirut and on through Baghdad, Basra, Kuwait, and Cairo. Some of that you could still do, like Beirut and Cairo, but I can't find out where she laid her head in either. And Iraq is effectively off the tourist map for now.
Her favourite story from the whole expedition came from a dawn arrival in Portuguese East Africa, today's Mozambique. It was too hot for make-up, she decided, and nobody would know her out here anyway, so why bother. Then the plane taxied in and she saw a crowd she put at 20,000 waiting at the little airport, and asked her husband who on earth they were all there for. "You, darling," he told her. Her pictures, she marvelled, had reached the most remote corners of the world.
" "Who are they waiting for?" "You, darling"
Travel like Joan
She was, by the standards of the jet age or any other, a spectacular traveller: relentless, glamorous, faintly terrifying, and utterly committed to the performance of being Joan Crawford wherever in the world she happened to touch down. She had a rule about it. "I never go outside," she said, "unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door." The morning she nearly skipped her make-up in Africa was the exception, and the twenty thousand people waiting on the tarmac were, in a sense, her whole point.
If you want her version of her travels in her own words, she left two books worth packing. A Portrait of Joan, her 1962 autobiography, is the life story in full; My Way of Life, from 1971, is the gloriously bossy instruction manual for being fabulous, right down to how to pack a suitcase and how many is too many (Joan's answer: there is no such thing). For the outside view, the shelf of biographies is deep: Scott Eyman's Joan Crawford: A Woman's Face, drawn from the Crawford estate's own papers, is the newest and most exhaustive; Bob Thomas's Joan Crawford: A Biography remains the great early account; and Donald Spoto's Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford and Charlotte Chandler's Not the Girl Next Door round out the modern picture.
You do not need a soft-drink empire to follow her. You need only a taste for grand hotels, a high tolerance for glamour, and the good sense to travel, as she did, like a star of the first magnitude. Pack accordingly. The case of Pepsi is optional.