Joan Lowell

Joan Lowell, born Helen Wagner on November 23, 1902, in Berkeley, California, was an American actress, author, and journalist who died on November 7, 1967, in Brasília, Brazil. She attended Garfield Junior High School in Berkeley and later the Munson School for Private Secretaries in San Francisco, where she acquired stenography skills. After taking acting lessons to pursue a career in film, she adopted the stage name Joan Lowell.

Lowell received her dramatic training from Gwendolen Logan Seiler and began her screen career as an extra at Goldwyn Pictures at age seventeen. Among her early film appearances was the role of Madge Barlow in Loving Lies (1924), followed by a leading part in Branded a Thief (1924), a picture set against Mexican frontier life. She also appeared alongside Monte Blue in Cap'n Dan. Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1926 in the play Port O' London. On October 16, 1927, she married playwright Thompson Buchanan, and the couple lived on a 170-acre farm three miles from New Hope, Pennsylvania, though they separated in October 1929. Lowell remained on the property in one of two stone houses, which she named Joan's Ark. Her final screen credit came with Adventure Girl (1934), directed by Herman C. Raymaker and loosely adapted from her autobiography. In 1935, she brought a lawsuit against Van Beuren Studios and Amedee J. Van Beuren seeking an accounting of the film's profits, and Van Beuren responded with a counterclaim of $300,000, alleging damages from what he characterized as Lowell's deficient performance.

In 1929, Simon & Schuster published Lowell's autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, in which she claimed her father, a ship captain, had taken her aboard his vessel, the Minnie A. Caine, at three months of age to treat her malnutrition, and that she had lived among the all-male crew until the age of seventeen, developing seamanship skills, harpooning a whale unassisted, and ultimately swimming three miles to shore when the ship burned and sank off Australia, with a litter of kittens clinging to her back. The book became a sensational bestseller until the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed her former Berkeley neighbors later that year and exposed the account as fabricated. In reality, Lowell had spent only fifteen months aboard the ship, which never left California waters. Simon & Schuster reclassified the book as fiction and offered refunds on returns, though sales continued despite the controversy. Lowell herself acknowledged altering the facts, stating that eighty percent was true and the remainder was embellished for readability and to protect certain individuals. The book was later parodied by Corey Ford in Salt Water Taffy. Her father, Captain Nicholas Wagner, had sailed the Minnie A. Caine and had taken his wife and daughter, then thirteen, on a voyage with him. Lowell's autobiography also claimed her mother descended from Boston's Lowell family and that her paternal grandfather was a Montenegrin landowner.

Following her separation from Buchanan, Lowell worked as a newspaper reporter in Boston in the early 1930s. In January 1932, booking agent Morris Levine, who had assaulted her, was sentenced to fourteen months in prison. By 1934, she was working at WOR radio station in New York City. In 1936, she married a sea captain named Leek Bowen, and the two relocated to Brazil, where they established a coffee plantation called The Anchorage in Anápolis, in the state of Goiás. Working as a real estate agent in the region, Lowell sold land to Hollywood figures including Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin. Known locally as Dona Joana, she later drove a Volkswagen along the Belém–Brasília highway from south to north, an journey chronicled in a national magazine during the 1960s. She documented her Brazilian experiences in the book Promised Land, published in 1952. The Jan Magalinski Institute in Anápolis preserves her archives and continues research into her life and legacy.