Joan Crawford: The dearest mommie of all
One cannot think of Joan Crawford without the image of Faye Dunaway portraying her in 1981’s campy, almost satirical film, Mommie Dearest, adapted from Christina Crawford’s 1978 autobiography following her and her brother Christopher’s upbringing under their allegedly abusive, controlling and manipulative actress mother who adopted them, prioritizing her Hollywood career over family.
A crazed Dunaway screaming “No wire hangers!” has become a cult meme, culled from the scene when she discovered that Christina was hanging her dresses using metal wires instead of silk padded ones. After going through an alcohol-driven rampage, throwing each dress on the floor shouting “I buy you $300 dresses and you treat them like dish rags?!” she proceeds to start beating her daughter with one of the dreaded hangers as the poor child cries and pleads for her mother to stop.
Joan once reportedly said that her own childhood was brutal: “There was not one goddamn moment on the Good Ship Lollipop.” She was born Lucille Fay Le Sueur (in 1908 she claims, 1904 says Christina) in San Antonio, Texas, to Thomas, a carpenter father who abandoned the family when she was 10 months old, leaving her mother, Anna, to raise her and her brother. When Anna married Henry Cassin, who ran a vaudeville house in Oklahoma, Lucille changed her name to Billie Cassin and worshipped her stepfather until age seven, when he was accused of embezzlement and they had to flee to Kansas City where they fell into abject poverty.
Billie became a working student in a school where she was treated as an outcast and suffered abuse from a headmistress who grabbed her by the hair, threw her down a flight of stairs and beat her with a broom handle till she was dazed, shouting, “I’ll teach you to work if I have to kill you.”
After a first job as a chorus girl, she signed a contract with MGM, where she was christened Joan Crawford and became known as the queen of Charleston, notorious for a hard-hitting drive and style—“the best example of a flapper,” F. Scott Fitzgerald declared.
But the exhibitionism was just a camouflage to cover up an inferiority complex which she vowed to overcome by remaking herself into a lady— and a star, which she achieved by the 1930s when her fame rivaled colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo by playing hardworking women who find romance and financial success, stories that resonated with Depression-era women. Film mirrored reality when she said, “The demands I make on myself are fantastic. I expect perfection. I get it at rare moments—but they’re too rare.”
The one thing missing in her picture-perfect life was children since she suffered miscarriages, so after the dissolution of her second marriage to Franchot Tone, she decided on adoption, facilitated by the gangster Meyer Lansky, according to Christina, since it was illegal for single women to adopt in California. Born in 1938, Christina was the first child of Joan who described her as “the ugliest little mite but grew into a blond-haired doll and I gave her all my love and attention.”
“I was hers alone. Through the lavish affection and adornment she showered upon me, she tried to make up for the poverty of her own childhood,” wrote Christina in her autobiography. She was constantly reassured by Joan that she was special because she was chosen, so she was bred to be the ideal child and relished pleasing her mother. Joan organized lavish birthday parties for her and Christmases “like a department store delivered under our tree.” But according to Christina, she and her younger brother Christopher and twins Cathy and Cindy who were adopted later, were little more than props who could only choose one gift each and were forced to write endless thank-you notes for the gifts.
Joan and Christina had moments of connection, however, like on a trip to Carmel where the mother was crying while revealing her lonely childhood, hurts and heartaches to her seven-year-old daughter, who was too young to understand but simply comforted her with “I love you, Mommie Dearest.”
Back at home, however, Christina claims her life was “as regimented as the army, with endless chores, frequent beatings with hairbrushes and the terrifying prospect of being locked in the closet.” The punishments were bizarre and psychologically damaging, like when Christina ripped the wallpaper in her bedroom, Joan shredded her favorite dress and forced her to wear it for a week. When asked why she was punished, she had to reply: “I don’t know how to take care of pretty things.”
When Christina failed to clean her bathroom properly, Joan supposedly beat her with a can of powder cleanser, which took her hours to clean off the tiles and herself. “I was only nine years old and I truly wished the earth would open and just take me out of this eternal misery and punishment.”
Things even became worse when Joan’s hard-won career went downhill after her film, Mildred Pierce, in 1945. Christina started becoming headstrong and fought back, making Joan even more violent, once even trying to choke her until the secretary came to save her.
After years in a convent school, Christina tried to find happiness by being an actress like her mother, who was then going around the world with her fourth husband, Pepsi-Cola chairman Alfred Steele. She accused her mother of blackballing her career and abandoning her brother Christopher. Joan obviously favored the twins, writing in her book: “Unlike Christina and Christopher, the twins don’t resent my life, they’re pliant, joyous, they link arms with me and off we march into whatever life may offer.”
The feeling was mutual. One of the twins, Cathy Crawford La Londe, said in 1981, “My mother was a very warm person. She was always there when we needed her. She was a working mother, but she always had time for us, and as far as Mommie Dearest, it’s a work of fiction.” The other twin, Cindy Crawford Jordan, told reporters, “I can’t understand how people believe this stupid stuff Tina has written.”
Joan continued acting in film and TV through the 1960s until her retirement in 1970 after the horror film Trog. She withdrew from public life and became reclusive until her death in 1977. The relationship with Christina never healed, however, and both she and Christopher were written out of Joan’s will “for reasons which are well known to them,” the last words of their mother, who stayed true to character till the end.