JOAN CRAWFORD

When twenty-year-old Lucille LeSueur stepped off the train from Kansas City in January 1925 to dance for MGM, this modest boarding hotel on Van Buren Place, a few blocks from the studio lot, was her very first California address. She spent roughly her first six months here, before Joan Crawford existed. The 1920s building has been lovingly restored as the boutique Palihotel Culver City, which means you can now book the room where the whole story started.

On September 14, 1929, three months married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and newly declared "a star" by an MGM accountant, Joan pressed her hands and feet into the wet cement of the forecourt beside Pickford, Chaplin and Swanson. She had arrived in Hollywood four years earlier as an uncredited body-double for Norma Shearer. The prints are still there, and so is the sense of occasion.

The pink palace was Joan's natural habitat for premieres, awards dinners and feuds. She attended the Photoplay awards here (and was famously incensed by a low-cut Marilyn Monroe entrance) and turned up for a 1951 party honouring Dinah Shore. The Polo Lounge still rewards the sort of guest who dresses for lunch, which is to say the sort of guest Joan always was.

In October 1949, Joan and her lawyer Greg Bautzer attended a party here thrown by Louis B. Mayer for Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Bautzer danced with Ginger Rogers; on the drive home Joan asked him to step out and check a tyre, then drove off and left him to walk. The hotel is more forgiving of its guests than Joan was of hers.

The one great survivor. Joan's Hollywood was a city of supper clubs (Ciro's, the Mocambo, Romanoff's, the Cocoanut Grove) and every one of them is now gone. Musso's is the exception: it has poured martinis since 1919 and looked much the same through all of Joan's decades. When you want to dine where the old town still breathes, this is the room. Order a martini straight up and settle into a red flannel booth.

In the spring of 1946, the week after she won her Oscar, Joan let attorney Greg Bautzer follow her out to the desert, and the pair got together for the first time at La Quinta. The hacienda-style resort where Frank Capra wrote screenplays under the palms is still there, still low-slung and bougainvillea-draped, and still the right place to disappear for a scandalous long weekend.

For all the caviar and penthouses, Joan's happiest travelling ritual was startlingly simple. She loved to pack a picnic. Biographer Scott Eyman records that she would drive the twins up the coast to Carmel and lay out a hamper on the sand; her daughter Cathy remembered these as some of the warmest hours of her childhood. Do as Joan did: pack a proper hamper, drive Highway 1, and spread a rug where the cypress meets the Pacific.

Inside the old Max Factor Building, the Hollywood Museum keeps costumes, letters and personal effects from Joan and her contemporaries. It is the single best place to stand a few feet from the actual armour (the gowns, the shoulder pads, that face) from which Joan built her public self.

On June 3, 1929, Joan married Douglas Fairbanks Jr. at St. Malachy's church and the newlyweds stayed at the Algonquin. She was twenty-three, he was nineteen, and their union made her a sort of Hollywood crown princess, ushered at last into Pickfair. The Round Table hotel is still the literary heart of Midtown, still dark-panelled and clubby, and still a fine place to begin a marriage or a manuscript.

After she married Alfred Steele, the couple bought and gutted the top two floors of this Fifth Avenue building overlooking Central Park, and her old friend, the decorator Billy Haines, turned it into one of the most photographed apartments in New York. It became Joan's true home for the rest of her life. You cannot go in (it is private), but the façade at 70th and Fifth is a fine stop on a Central Park walk.

This is where you can meet Joan off duty. The Eastman Museum holds and has preserved her own home movies, the 16mm footage she shot herself around 1940 to 1942, filming her family often in colour at a time when her features were still black and white. A gift from her grandson Casey LaLonde, they show the larger-than-life star unadorned, simply being herself. The museum also screens classic Hollywood in its Dryden Theatre the way it was meant to be seen, on film, in a proper house, so you can watch Mildred Pierce or Grand Hotel on a pilgrimage rather than a phone.

The Billy Rose Theatre Division at Lincoln Center is where Joan's paper trail lives: photographs, clippings, programmes and the documentary residue of a fifty-year career. Serious devotees can request materials in the reading room. It is also a short walk from the Plaza and the old Stork Club site, which makes for a tidy Crawford afternoon.

Las Vegas gave Joan her most dramatic wedding. At 2am on May 10, 1955, she married Pepsi chairman Alfred Steele in the penthouse of the Flamingo, days after he had talked her into eloping. Three weeks earlier she had served as hostess for the grand opening of the Riviera (with Liberace headlining), a hotel since demolished. Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo, much rebuilt, still anchors the Strip and still trades on exactly the midnight glamour Joan married into.

Joan came to the Fontainebleau regularly through her Pepsi years, when Miami was the winter capital of American showbusiness and Morris Lapidus's curved white ziggurat was its throne room. It was where she could be a Pepsi ambassador by day and a movie star by night without changing hotels. The restored Fontainebleau still trades on that exact combination of boardroom and ballroom.

Joan spent her childhood as "Billie" Cassin in Lawton, where her stepfather ran an opera house and she cut her foot so badly on a broken milk bottle that she missed a year and a half of school. The Museum of the Great Plains tells the story of the frontier town that made her, long before Hollywood remade her. A moving stop for the completist who wants to meet Lucille before she met the camera.

Joan spent several Christmases in the early 1960s at the historic Half Moon on Jamaica's north coast, having first come with Alfred Steele in the 1950s. The couple were especially fond of the resort's oceanfront cottages. Half Moon remains one of the Caribbean's grand old estates, all crescent beach and colonial calm, and its cottages still suit a movie star who wants the sea to herself.

On her honeymoon with Alfred Steele, Joan took in pre-revolution Havana at its glittering height, staying at the iconic clifftop Hotel Nacional and dancing at the fabled Tropicana nightclub. The Nacional still presides over the Malecón, its twin towers and sea-facing garden bar largely unchanged, a living relic of the Havana that Joan knew when it called itself the Paris of the Caribbean.

In the 1960s Joan stayed at the Buena Vista, then a prominent A-list hotel on a hill above Nassau. The historic mansion and its gardens survive today as John Watling's Distillery, where you can tour the colonial estate and taste Bahamian rum where the stars once dined.

In December 1958, Joan and Al Steele wintered at Laurance Rockefeller's newly opened Dorado Beach on the north coast of Puerto Rico, an early temple of understated tropical luxury carved out of a former grapefruit plantation. It was one of the last great trips of her marriage; Steele died the following April. Today a Ritz-Carlton Reserve, Dorado Beach remains the discreet, palm-shaded, deeply expensive kind of resort Joan came to love.

Joan returned to Puerto Rico in 1969 to receive the Rafael Ramos Cobián Achievement Award, and stayed at the glamorous El San Juan on Isla Verde Beach. Its carved-mahogany lobby is still one of the great grand entrances in the Caribbean, restored now to full Fairmont splendour.

Joan was a frequent visitor to the neighbouring Caribe Hilton, where she famously praised the piña coladas, appropriately, since the hotel claims to be the drink's birthplace (mixed here by bartender Ramón "Monchito" Marrero in 1954). Take her advice and order one on the terrace.

On December 22, 1955, Joan, Al Steele and all four children arrived by sleigh at Badrutt's Palace in St. Moritz. On Christmas Eve they opened their presents over champagne and caviar; on their last night Joan threw a party for the writer Paul Gallico. The turreted Palace above the frozen lake is still Switzerland's most theatrical grand hotel, and still exactly the backdrop against which Joan liked to be photographed in furs.

Every leg of that 1955 to 1956 grand tour ran through the George V. The family freshened up here on December 21 before the night train to Switzerland, and checked back in on the way home in January to sightsee for three days before taking the Blue Train south to Cannes. The George V remains the most sumptuous of the Paris palaces, the one with the famous flowers, and it wears Joan's brand of polished glamour beautifully.

On her 1955 honeymoon with Alfred Steele, Joan stayed at the exquisite La Réserve at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the Riviera between Nice and Monaco, and was photographed dining on its Mediterranean terrace. She knew this coast well: back in the early 1930s she and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. had holidayed along the same shore. La Réserve is a Belle Époque jewel of only thirty-nine rooms, and its sea-facing terrace is still set for exactly the sort of lunch Joan liked.

Once Joan became Pepsi's globe-trotting first lady, Paris meant honeymoon nights at Maxim's and the whole apparatus of a corporate queen abroad. We follow that itinerary in detail in our Pepsi-years guide.

The grande dame of the Via Veneto, opened in 1906, the Excelsior was Joan's Rome, and she was photographed among its marble and gilt on more than one Italian visit. Between the Spanish Steps and the Borghese Gardens, it remains one of the capital's most iconic luxury hotels, made for arrivals in dark glasses and a good coat.

On her June 1955 honeymoon with Al Steele, Joan based herself at the Grand Hotel Quisisana in the heart of Capri, the island's grande dame and the traditional harbour for Hollywood stars and the international jet set for well over a century. A few steps from the Piazzetta, it remains a five-star landmark, exactly the sort of address from which a movie star could stroll out to be photographed.

By day the honeymooners decamped to La Canzone del Mare, the exclusive bathing club built into the cliffs at Marina Piccola by the English singer Gracie Fields. Joan was famously photographed here, all sunglasses and Capri pants, against the rocks and the sea. The club still serves lunch and cocktails above its saltwater terraces, and it is still the most glamorous place on the island to spend a morning.

The following January the family sailed home from the Bay of Naples aboard the ill-fated Andrea Doria, stopping to see Pompeii on the way. (The Naples leg turned briefly frightening when a crowd grabbed at Joan's jewellery and the family fled to the ship.) The bay and its Roman ruins remain the most cinematic stretch of the Italian south.

Joan's Pepsi decade filled Italy with more signature hotels, from the Hassler above the Spanish Steps to the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan for the 1961 Giro d'Italia. Both feature in our Pepsi-years guide.

The Savoy on the Strand was Joan's London anchor for decades. She held a press conference and reception here during her 1956 trip to film The Story of Esther Costello, and returned in April 1966 as a guest of honour for the Variety Club's International Convention. She loved to pose for photographers on its riverside steps. The Savoy remains the grandest address on the Thames, and still receives its guests with the ceremony Joan expected.

On that same 1956 London trip, photographers caught Joan at the Dorchester on Park Lane having a stray thread bitten off her gown, immaculate to the last stitch, as ever. The Dorchester is still Mayfair's most glamorous hotel, its Promenade the perfect place to be seen taking tea.

In 1969, arriving to film the horror picture Trog (her final feature), Joan based herself in a suite at Grosvenor House on Park Lane. It was the last of her grand London residencies, and the JW Marriott Grosvenor House still offers the sort of Park Lane suite from which a movie star could commute to a film set in style.

Joan's London went right back to 1932, when she and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. took a late honeymoon at the Berkeley in Piccadilly, saw Noël Coward's Cavalcade at Drury Lane, and weekended at Coward's country house. The Berkeley has since moved to Knightsbridge but keeps its between-the-wars glamour intact.

Joan came to Madrid on June 2, 1962, as a guest of honour for a film festival, staying at the Hotel Olympic and taking in the full Spanish welcome, bullfight included. It was a characteristically regal Crawford appearance: the movie star as visiting dignitary, gracious, photographed and perfectly turned out.

The 1957 Pepsi tour carried Joan through Beirut, Baghdad, Basra and Cairo, a glamorous, now largely un-followable itinerary through a Middle East that has changed beyond recognition. We cover where you can (and, honestly, cannot) retrace her steps in our Pepsi-years guide.