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THE PEPSI YEARS: CRAWFORD OUTSIDE CINEMA
The dimension of Joan Crawford’s post-studio career that receives the least attention in the rivalry narrative is also, in some ways, the most revealing about who she was: her decade-plus association with the Pepsi-Cola Company.
She married Alfred Steele, Pepsi’s president, in 1955—her fourth and final marriage. The relationship combined the personal and the professional in the way that Crawford’s relationships had tended to do throughout her life; she was genuinely devoted to Steele and genuinely interested in the company he ran. When he died of a heart attack in April 1959, she was elected to Pepsi’s board of directors—a position that made her, as has been noted, the first woman to serve on the board of a major American corporation.
She took the role seriously. She traveled internationally to represent the company, appeared at bottling plant openings, attended industry events, and brought to the corporate identity of Pepsi the same fierce professionalism she had applied to her film career. Press photographs from this period show her in the same controlled, high-production mode she had maintained throughout her Hollywood years, with the specific content of the image shifted from film production to beverage marketing.
The Pepsi work provided something that the Hollywood work of the late 1950s was not providing: relevance, purpose, and a context in which her capabilities were valued unconditionally. The film industry had been ambivalent about what to do with her; the corporate world gave her a function and she performed it with characteristic competence.