A few weeks later, Christina required emergency surgery in New York, where she was working under contract to CBS, playing a twenty-four-year-old housewife on the daily afternoon soap opera The Secret Storm. Her sudden illness caused a major problem for the network—how to provide an immediate replacement for a twenty-nine-year-old actress on short notice. Joan, then sixty-two, leaped to the rescue, and in two days, she taped four brief appearances, to be broadcast that October. “I didn’t want them to give the role to someone else,” she told a reporter. On the telephone to Christina, she said,
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