Cleopatra Dressed Here

Joan Craig was five years old in 1947, when her family moved to 702 Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills, and already she was hobnobbing with the stars. She met her best friend, Ava Astaire, in Sunday School at All Saints Church in Beverly Hills when she was four, and when she went to Fred Astaire's house to play with Ava, the neighbors were Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers, director William Wyler, and Charlie and Oona Chaplin and their horde of kids.

"I went to many, many celebrity homes," Craig recalls. "Their children were my closest friends. Because my family wasn't in the film business, it was okay for me to be

playmates with their children. I had no connection with studio politics." There weren't many children around 702 Alpine Drive, however, and Craig was fascinated with Charlie Brabin, the 64-year-old man in the corner house on the next block who liked to putter around his garden.

"My parents always said don't talk to strangers, you know, but…he'd talk to me and give me a nickel or a piece of candy—actually it was some sort of calcium tablet," she says. "One day he asked me if I'd like to meet the lady of the house. I said yes, and he told me he had to get permission from her. The next time I went over, I was invited to go in.

"I remember walking into the room. Uncle Charlie called out, ‘Moody, we're here.' And then Theda Bara made her entrance and asked me to sit on the couch. She was such a memorable person when she walked in the room—it's something you don't forget. We talked, and she had a crystal ball on the table and every once in awhile she would peek at it.