Queen of the Fabricated Memoir

I also searched magazine and newspaper archives.  There was another disappointment in 1929, after her book was dragged through the mud. In September Thompson Buchanan opened a play at Christopher Morley's Hoboken Theatre with Joan in the lead role.  The play closed two weeks later.  A New York Times reporter tracked the author to his apartment at Washington Place and asked him directly about a report that the couple might file for divorce because of what their spokespeople had called a "recently discovered incompatibility of temperament."

Buchanan told the reporter, "I did not know what temperament was until the failure of my play 'The Star of Bengal,' in which my wife was starred."

Undaunted by these reversals, Joan sank what was left of her book money into the writing and filming of "Adventure Girl" (1934) in the West Indies and Central America, with the vague notion that it would prove that although "Cradle of the Deep" was not true autobiography, it might as well have been.  After all, she added, "any damn fool can be accurate – and dull."

In this "fact and fiction" talkie, Joan plays herself as she is buffeted by a hurricane, battles a boa constrictor and an octopus, and is nearly burned at the stake by hostile natives ("most of whom are smiling in amusement," noted a review).  By now, she was billing herself as a globetrotting explorer, skilled mariner and deep-sea diver...don't laugh, the movie turned a profit for RKO.

Her life continued to be one of high adventure.  In 1935, on a cruise, she fell in love with the ship's captain, who inspired her with his ambition to carve an empire out of the Brazilian jungle.  He didn't believe she could do it; to prove she could, she spent a year living on a remote beach, where he was supposed to pick her up a year later.  He didn't show up.  She tracked him to New York City, where he'd been offered the job of director of the Port of New York.  Persuading him to follow their dream, she married her captain and they went to Brazil, with little capital but lots of energy.

They took on the job of building a 100-mile road into the jungle in the state of Goiaz.  After three years of backbreaking labor, along with what workers they could find, the road was finished.  The reward: land. Thousands of acres.  Joan wrote about their first glimpse: "To the south and west from the mountain ridge we could see our frontier.  Hundreds of miles of hardwood forest covering rich red earth...we stood thrilled, gazing at it."

When the book about these hardships and triumphs was published in 1952, Charles Poore revisited her story when he reviewed "Promised Land."

"Joan Lowell stirred up one of the most uproariously enjoyable lit'ry teapot-gales of modern times when she wrote 'Cradle of the Deep.' That flawed epic of the hornpipe set maddened a handful of saltwater scholiasts to a livid degree.  They called upon Heaven, Homer and Herman Melville to witness that she didn't know her ship's lee scuppers from a marlinspike....

"The old gaffers around here tell me that all happened way back in 1929 and seems to have reached some sort of climax when Miss Lowell's forthright, upright, downright publishers offered to refund the money of all purchasers of 'Cradle of the Deep' who felt they'd been had.  How many disgruntled readers went and got their cash at the barrelhead is not known.  Not many, I hope, since the book's wonderfully lively reading, as art or artlessness....

"What happened to Miss Lowell?  Oh, she wrote another book or two without taking the nation's mind off the Depression, and sailed to Brazil on a hare-brained foray dedicated to the discovery of a new frontier. That's what her new book is all about...."

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