Two weeks overdue in Los Angeles, California, the schooner was sighted in January 1925, fifteen miles (24 km) northwest of San Diego.

After completing a leading part in Branded a Thief (1924), about Mexican frontier life, Lowell was chosen as the "Queen of the Fourth of July" for 1924 in Tijuana, Mexico.

[citation needed] Her last screen role was in Adventure Girl (1934), a film directed by Herman C. Raymaker and loosely based on her fictionalized autobiography.

Van Beuren promptly made a counterclaim for $300,000, damages allegedly sustained because of Lowell's "inexpert" performance in the picture.

[4] In 1929, Joan Lowell wrote an autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, published by Simon & Schuster, in which she claimed that her seafaring father took her aboard his ship, the Minnie A. Caine, at the age of three months when she was suffering from malnutrition and nursed her back to health.

[1] She claimed that the ship ultimately burned and sank off Australia, and that she swam three miles to safety with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back.

[1] Cradle of the Deep was later parodied by Corey Ford in his book Salt Water Taffy, in which Lowell abandons the sinking ship (which had previously sunk several times before, "very badly") and swims to safety with her manuscript.

[5] Later in 1929, Lowell's book about growing up at sea was exposed as a fabrication when her former neighbors in Berkeley were interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Working as a real estate agent, she also sold land to Hollywood actors and actresses such as Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin in Anápolis.

She was called "Dona Joana" by the locals and after a long time in Anápolis she made a remarkable trip, crossing the national road "Belém–Brasília" from south to north, driving a Volkswagen.