Daughter Dearest | Vanity Fair
Daughter Dearest
Excerpt
Daughter Dearest
One of Hollywood’s greatest stars, Joan Crawford, was redefined as a sadistic control freak by Mommie Dearest, her daughter’s 1978 tell-all. In an excerpt from the author’s new Crawford biography, based in part on interviews with another Crawford daughter, a very different story emerges.
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Excerpted from Not the Girl Next Door, by Charlotte Chandler, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster; © 2008 by the author.
Joan Crawford with her four adopted children, Christina, Christopher, and the twins, Cathy and Cindy, in the early 50s. From Underwood & Underwood/Corbis.
It was clear as I listened to Joan Crawford and her longtime friend and publicist, John Springer, at a lunch in 1976, almost two years before the publication of Joan’s daughter Christina’s book Mommie Dearest, that they knew it was forthcoming. They spoke about it with a sense of foreboding, though they had no idea that it would turn out to be the prototype of angry books by the children of stars. “I think she’s using my name strictly to make money,” Joan told us. “I suppose she doesn’t think that I’m going to leave her enough or that I’m going to disappear soon enough.” She sighed. Obviously referring to her adoption of Christina, she said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Springer asked her if she planned to read the book. “I plan not to read it,” she replied. “Why spoil days of your life reading a book that can only hurt you? It’s against my beliefs. You know, Johnny, I’ve become a Christian Scientist. I find it very positive and comforting and a kind of protection. I’ve learned that there are people who will hurt you if you let them—even if you don’t let them. I prefer to cut off people who want to hurt me, rather than to continue to give them power over me to go on inflicting pain.”
As we lunched that day, Crawford was dying of cancer. Springer had brought me together with her some time earlier in the hope that I could produce an intimate biography of one of the most enduring of Hollywood stars, who had made more than 80 films in a career that started in 1925 and ended in 1970. She had won the Oscar for best actress in 1946, for Mildred Pierce (ironically, about a mother and an ungrateful daughter), and she had had featured roles in such film classics as Grand Hotel, with John Barrymore and Greta Garbo, in 1932, and George Cukor’s film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, in 1939. In 1962 she had starred opposite her great rival, Bette Davis, in Robert Aldrich’s blockbuster What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the first of a series of camp horror films featuring aging grandes dames of the cinema. She had been married to two of Hollywood’s leading men, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (1929–33) and Franchot Tone (1935–39), as well as to the actor Phillip Terry (1942–46) and Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele (1955 until his death, in 1959). From 1959 to 1973 she served on the board of Pepsi-Cola.
Unable to have children, she had adopted five: a girl, Christina, in 1940; a boy, Christopher, in 1942, who was soon reclaimed by his birth mother; a second boy, also named Christopher, in 1943; and twin girls, Catherine (Cathy) and Cynthia (Cindy), in 1947. Christina, like her mother, became an actress, and for a time was a regular on the CBS soap opera The Secret Storm. During a leave Christina took for major surgery, in 1968, Joan, who was then in her early 60s, replaced her 29-year-old daughter on the show. That created an unhappy rivalry, which resulted in a long estrangement and, ultimately, the book we were discussing that day at lunch.
“I think this book will be full of lies and twisted truths,” Crawford said, adding, “I don’t think my adopted daughter is writing this book just to hurt me. If her purpose were to hurt me, she has already accomplished it without going to the trouble of writing a book.
“If Christina had good things to say about the person who adored her, tried to be a good mother to her, she would have told me about the book. I would have helped if I could, if she wanted my help.
“I’ve come to think that what she has wanted is to be me. Or at least to have what I have. I wanted to share everything I had with her, but I couldn’t reach or influence her.
“She is her own person, and that person brought me a lot of pain. I said this about Christopher [Crawford’s estranged adopted son] and now I say it about Christina. The problem was I adopted her, but she didn’t adopt me.”
On May 10, 1977, Joan Crawford died in her bedroom in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The papers announced that she had died of a heart attack, a coronary occlusion. That was what she had wanted, “not a discussion of my insides.” The heart attack may have been brought on by her deteriorating health.
Her obituary appeared on page one of The New York Times, giving her birth date as March 23, 1908. No one would have appreciated the words on her position in film history more than Crawford herself: “Miss Crawford was a quintessential superstar—an epitome of timeless glamour who personified for decades the dreams and disappointments of American women.”
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. told me that he was asked frequently by interviewers if he believed Joan had ended her own life, as had been rumored. His answer was an unequivocal no. “She had the strong will to be able to do it, if it was what she had wanted to do, but nobody could convince me she would want to do that. Even in pain, even with no hope of ever getting better, I feel it was against her religious and ethical beliefs. It took the greater strength for her to go on. She liked to be in control of her life as much as possible, and she didn’t like to feel out of control. I believe that when she heard the bad news—no hope—she waited for a natural death without trying to prolong a life she didn’t consider would be worth living. She wanted to die in a dignified way, looking as well as she could. I know that.”
According to Crawford’s instructions, she was cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn at Ferncliff Cemetery, Westchester County, New York, next to her last husband, Alfred Steele. The funeral was held at Campbell’s Funeral Home, in New York City. Among those in attendance were the actress Myrna Loy, who had known her the longest, the actors Van Johnson and Brian Aherne, the artist Andy Warhol, John Springer, and Joan’s four children: Christina, 37; Christopher, 33; and the twins, Cindy and Cathy, 30.
On May 17, a memorial service was held at All Souls Unitarian Church. Eulogies were read by the writer Anita Loos, the actress Geraldine Brooks, the actor Cliff Robertson, and George Cukor, who had directed Crawford in four films and who characterized her as “the perfect image of the movie star.” He spoke of her intelligence, her vitality, her will, her beauty. He said something he always said in one way or another when speaking about her: “The camera saw a side of her that no flesh-and-blood lover ever saw.”
A year and a half after Crawford’s memorial, Mommie Dearest was published by William Morrow. Christina depicted her mother as a sadistic control freak who inflicted the harshest punishments for the slightest infringement of rules by her two oldest children. Because Joan had won the U.S.O.’s Woman of the Year award, Christina originally titled her book Mother of the Year, but she later changed it to Mommie Dearest. She portrayed Joan as an abusive mother who had no understanding of, or feeling for, her children, and whose only real attention to them was to administer discipline and punishment. The most noted scene involved a night raid on Christina’s closet followed by a beating because some of the clothes were on wire hangers. The line “No wire hangers!” as well as the title of the book entered the nation’s vernacular. It was generally believed that publication of the book had been delayed in order to allay any suspicions that Christina had written it because she had been left out of Joan’s will. The book immediately made the best-seller list and stayed there for months.
In 1981 a film based on the book was released, starring Faye Dunaway. A number of actresses had turned down the part. Christina had wanted to write the script, but her screenplay was rejected. The film, which became a cult classic, has contributed to the Mommie Dearest stigma.
When Crawford died, Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, asked the studios to observe a minute of silence to honor her. When I spoke with Valenti more than 20 years later, I asked him if he could have had the minute of tribute if Christina had published her book before her mother’s death.
“I would have tried,” Valenti said, “but I don’t think I would have been successful. Words in print have an enormous effect. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to undo that book her daughter wrote, and I’m not going to dignify it by mentioning its title.
“Joan Crawford deserved the honor as an icon. It was a professional honor, paying tribute to her career and what it had meant all those years to Hollywood. But there was no way that the portrait that was painted of her by her daughter and received as truth wouldn’t have cast aspersions on her name. That blurred the personal and the professional.
“I knew this lady, and I know she had done many good deeds anonymously. She was always dependable for helping out with worthy charities and good deeds, and that’s the way I remember her.”
Crawford left about $2 million in her will. On October 28, 1976, less than a year before her death, she had made a new will. She left a trust fund of $77,500 to each of her adopted twin daughters, $35,000 to her longtime friend and secretary, Betty Barker, and smaller bequests to a few other people.
She left money to her favorite charities: the U.S.O. of New York; the Motion Picture Home, of which she had been a founder; the American Cancer Society; the Muscular Dystrophy Association; the American Heart Association; and the Wiltwyck School for Boys.
She stated specifically that Christina and Christopher had been knowingly and deliberately left out of the will. “It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher or my daughter Christina for reasons which are well known to them.”
John Springer explained this to me. He said Joan had told him, “You know the troubles I’ve had with my two older children. I can’t understand why it turned out so badly. I tried to give them everything. I loved them and tried to keep them near me, even when they didn’t return my love. Well, I couldn’t make them love me, but they could have shown some respect. I couldn’t insist on love, but I could insist on respect.”
Betty Barker told me that she felt Christopher resented women. “He wouldn’t take orders from women.” He was sent to a military school for his high-school education. As soon as he could, he left home. He joined the army during the Vietnam War. After he was discharged, he brought his wife and child to meet his mother, but Crawford wouldn’t see them.
“I remember most clearly,” Crawford told me, “when a teenaged Christopher spat in my face. He said, ‘I hate you.’ It’s pretty hard to overlook that. I couldn’t.”
George Cukor informed me about Crawford’s secret charity. He said it was “something she had done for many people over the years, and some of those people lived good lives, which they owed to Joan. They might not have lived at all if not for her, but she didn’t want even the people she did it for to ever know.
“In 1926 she had gone to a young doctor, William Branch, for some ailment or other, and she was thrilled with him. He had the kind of dedication to his work that she had to hers. He was also very fair and said, ‘I’ll just charge you whatever you think you can afford to pay, because you’re a young actress and can’t afford very much now.’ And she said, ‘But you’re a young doctor starting out, and you must need the money.’ Joan had decided very early that she wanted to share her good fortune with others, and she had this idea, which she couldn’t afford then, but she was certain she was going to be able to afford.
“She said, ‘Sometime soon, I’m going to be earning more money than I need, and I would like to help people. I work with people who make the movies, the ones who have all of those little jobs without which there couldn’t be movies. They are so important, and they do such wonderful work. When they get sick and need medical help, some of them don’t have the financial means they need, so I want to see that they have the help they deserve. I want to pay for a room in the hospital and other costs.’ Dr. Branch said he would work free. Later, as she could afford it, Joan extended the gift to two rooms.
“They did this for many years, and Joan was always resolute, determined that the few people who knew should never tell anyone,” continued Cukor. “I’m only telling you now because Joan is gone, and I’m interpreting my promise as lasting for her lifetime. That seems fair. Besides, I think people should know what kind of person Joan was—an extraordinarily fine person.”
Many people, among them even some who knew Crawford, believed what Christina wrote. Some felt Crawford had mistreated her two older adopted children. Most of those closest to her, however, were vehement in their denunciation of the book and of Christina for writing it.
Joan Crawford was not Bette Davis’s favorite person, as Davis told me in one way or another during the years I was interviewing her for the biography I called The Girl Who Walked Home Alone and published in 2006. Nevertheless, Davis was outraged by Mommie Dearest. She told me, “I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan, but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. Horrible.
“I looked at that book, but I did not need to read it. I wouldn’t read trash like that, and I think it was a terrible, terrible thing for a daughter to do. An abomination! To do something like that to someone who saved you from the orphanage, foster homes—who knows what. If she didn’t like the person who chose to be her mother, she was grown up and could choose her own life.
“I felt very sorry for Joan Crawford, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my pity, because that’s the last thing she would have wanted—anyone being sorry for her, especially me.
“I can understand how hurt Miss Crawford had to be. Well, no I can’t. It’s like trying to imagine how I would feel if my own beloved, wonderful daughter, B.D., were to write a bad book about me. Unimaginable. I am grateful for my children and for knowing they would never do to me anything like what Miss Crawford’s daughter did to her.
“Of course, dear B.D., of whom I’m so proud, is my natural child, and there always are certain risks in adopting. Gary [Merrill] and I adopted two babies, because when we married I was too old to have our own. We were very pleased with our little boy, Michael, but our adopted daughter, who was a beautiful baby, was brain-damaged. I never have had regrets, though, because I think we provided for her better than anything else that could have happened to her, and we gave her some happiness in her life. You can’t return a baby like you can a carton of cracked eggs.”
Crawford had said to me, “There was one thing where Bette was one up on me. She’d had a baby, a child of her own. I wanted one, and Bette was so lucky to have been able to have her own daughter.”
With Mommie Dearest as her inspiration, B.D. would later write My Mother’s Keeper, a savage attack on Bette Davis, also published by William Morrow, in 1985. Davis responded with a harsh rebuttal in This ‘N That, published by Putnam in 1987, two years before her death.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr., when asked by the press if he thought his former wife really hit her children, dismissed such a possibility in a tone of mock seriousness. “Of course not. It would not only have been out of character, but she only used covered, padded hangers.” He added, “If you really want to know someone, you must see their emotions off guard. That’s how I know Joan Crawford could never have been cruel to her children. I really knew her, when she was still Billie, as she liked to be called in the early days. In a relationship as close as ours, I had the chance to see her in every kind of personal situation. She was never out of control. The most she was guilty of ever was a few sharp words, and not many of those. We had our rows, but she never showed any sudden bursts of temper.”
Cathy Crawford totally denied what Christina had said. She and her twin sister, Cindy, were devastated by the book and the film based on it. Cathy told me, “We lived in the same house as Christina, but we didn’t live in the same home, because she had her own reality. Cindy and I had a different reality—the opposite. I don’t know where she got her ideas. Our Mommie was the best mother anyone ever had.”
One of Crawford’s best friends, the actor Van Johnson, told me, “Some people said that Joan was better off being dead when Mommie Dearest came out, because it would have broken her heart, and this way she was spared all that pain. I’m not one of those people. I totally disagree. They didn’t know Joan. I wish the book had never happened. But if it had happened when Joan was still alive, and not too sick, I know her well enough to know she would have fought back, in her way. She had a quiet strength, but she was strong, and she was determined. Nothing wishy-washy about her. I think if she could have, Joan would have protected her life and her body of work against that viper she had taken to her bosom.”
“What bothers me,” Myrna Loy said, “is that there were book buyers who bought that book and read it and people who believed it. What perplexes me and makes me profoundly sad was that people wanted to spend their money that way, on such trash, and, worse yet, believed it. The readers who believed it were the ones who did the damage.”
“A lot of criticism has been leveled at Joan since the publication of her daughter’s book,” Vincent Sherman, who directed three of Joan’s films—The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Harriet Craig (1950), and Goodbye, My Fancy (1951)—and who had an affair with her, told me. “Christina hurt her mother’s image a lot, but at least not while Joan was still alive. Bette Davis wasn’t so fortunate, or maybe I should say she was more fortunate. She had to endure the hurt, but anyway she was there to defend herself and to go on the offensive. I think I knew Joan as well as anyone ever did, but I honestly don’t know how Joan would have handled Mommie Dearest if Christina had published it while she was still alive. She would have been heartbroken … but I don’t think she would have just fallen apart. She was strong, but the Joan I knew was a very, very vulnerable person. I think it would have depended on her health, but because she cared so much about what her fans thought, she would have done something if she could.”
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. added, “Her daughter knew how to hurt her. Joan was punished for her good deed. She had worked so hard for her place as a star and an icon. She even gave up her chance for a good marriage and personal happiness. She was willing to give up everything for it. She gave up me!”
Since I began interviewing Joan Crawford’s friends and children, a number of them have died—George Cukor in 1983, Myrna Loy in 1993, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 2000, Vincent Sherman in 2006, and Jack Valenti in 2007. Christopher Crawford died in 2006, at the age of 62. Cynthia Crawford died in October 2007, at the age of 60.
In accordance with Joan Crawford’s wishes, I have not spoken to Christina. She stopped acting in 1972, and she has been married and divorced three times. In 1998, on the 20th anniversary of the publication of Mommie Dearest, she published a revised, considerably enlarged edition, and has announced a 30th-anniversary edition for publication this year. She has a restaurant in Idaho and a half-hour live-entertainment weekly television show in Spokane, Washington.
I have spoken at length with Joan’s other living child, Cathy Crawford LaLonde, whose remembrances of Joan differ greatly from Christina’s.
“I was about six,” she told me, “and my sister Cindy and I were at school at Marymount, in Palos Verdes, and we were playing a game, ‘A tisket, a tasket, a green-and-yellow basket,’ and I fell down and broke my elbow and my wrist in a few places. The school called Mommie. She ran off the set in the middle of filming, out of the studio and into her car, wearing the full makeup she was wearing for the camera. She got me and took me to the doctor, and then we went home. She was still wearing makeup that she had on for the film. That’s how I remember her when I think about her, which I do every day. There is no better way to tell about the kind of mother I had. I was a teacher of children with special needs for 25 years, but when my own children were young, I told their schools that if one of my children ever felt sick or had an accident, they were to call me where I worked, and I would leave immediately to go to them, the way Mommie had done for me.
“When I was little, I didn’t know my mother was a movie star. She wasn’t a movie star in our house. I’ll never forget the night Mommie invited friends in to see a film of hers. It was called Humoresque [co-starring John Garfield, 1946]. I was very excited. Mommie had a separate theater in a building in the back of our house. It was a very nice place to watch a movie. I was about three or less. I got the seat next to Mommie, so I was very happy until the end of the movie, when I saw Mommie walking into the ocean. She was going to drown. I was so frightened, I started to cry. I grabbed Mommie’s arm. I held on to it, clutching her sleeve. She smiled at me and reassured me. ‘Honey, don’t cry. Here I am, Cathy. I’m right here. Nothing happened to me. It was a movie. It wasn’t real.’ That’s how I found out what Mommie did.”
Heartbroken after the attack on their mother in Mommie Dearest, neither Cathy nor Cindy Crawford ever gave interviews. Christina’s book left them feeling embarrassed and humiliated.
“It makes me very sad,” Cathy told me. “Every time Mommie’s name is mentioned, that book is mentioned. I don’t want to give it any more publicity than it’s already had. Even when people say or write good things about my mother, that book gets linked to her name. It’s so unfair.”
The twins were born on January 13, 1947, in a Byersburg, Tennessee, hospital. Cathy was eight minutes older than Cindy. Joan’s adoption certificate was dated January 16, 1947. The babies were premature and had to stay in the hospital for several weeks. Cathy remembered Joan telling her that she had weighed only a little more than three pounds.
Their mother, who had given them up for adoption, was very ill and died less than a week after the twins were born. She hadn’t been married. The adoption arrangements were made before the twins were born.
Cathy told me that she and her sister always considered Joan their mother, and they had no interest in knowing who their biological mother was. In the early 1990s, however, Cathy went back to Tennessee to find out about her family. “I learned my grandmother had seen a picture in a movie magazine of my sister and me with Mommie. She thought we were her grandchildren, so she saved the picture and carried it around in her purse. She never found out for sure that she was right.”
Cathy told me that her first memory was the image of her and Cindy doing dishes. They began doing them when they were so little they couldn’t reach the sink. They had to climb up on chairs. Cathy said that they also had other responsibilities and chores, such as making their beds and keeping their rooms neat, but that they saw them as part of their mother’s caring about them. Joan did certain chores with them, such as pulling weeds, and Cathy remembered that as “great fun.”
‘Mommie was very affectionate. My twin sister and I used to crawl into bed with her in the morning, and she would like that, and we did, too.
“I always liked riding with her on our holiday trips to Carmel. I would snuggle up to her while she drove up there. We always had wonderful times during our visits to Carmel. Mommie didn’t have to go to work, and it was so beautiful there.
“Two of her best friends, who came over and talked with us and played with us, were Uncle Van [Johnson] and Uncle Butch [Cesar Romero]. Uncle Van always wore red socks. We knew they weren’t really our uncles.
“As a special treat, sometimes my sister and I got our sleeping bags and ‘camped out,’ sleeping on the floor by Mommie’s bed.
“I remember, when we went to the theater in New York, a lot of times after the play Mommie was introduced. I was personally shy, but I didn’t mind it, because Mommie enjoyed it, and I understood it went with the territory.
“Mommie took us to Peter Pan with Mary Martin, and when we went backstage to her dressing room, she was waiting for us with stardust and the sparkly stuff she had gathered on her stage flight, which she gave to us.
“I have so many happy memories with Mommie. One I always remember is going to see Hello, Dolly! with her and Cindy. Carol Channing was a friend of Mommie’s. We had house seats, and she knew we would be coming backstage. She gave me and my sister—each of us—a beautiful bracelet of small diamonds. They weren’t really diamonds, but we thought they were. When I found out they were rhinestones, I loved it just as much.
“I remember,” Cathy continued, “going to Chasen’s with my sister and Mommie. We sat in one of those very big booths in the small front section where everybody Mommie knew liked to sit. Chasen’s was the great place to go in Hollywood, and Mommie and her friends always sat in those big booths. Once, we were eating our lunch, and I saw Judy Garland come in. I recognized her, because she was a friend of Mommie’s who came to our house. I tugged at Mommie’s sleeve and said, ‘Look, Aunt Judy is here.’ Mommie didn’t seem to hear me.
“Just as we were leaving, I told her again, ‘Look, Mommie. It’s Aunt Judy over there.’
“This time Mommie heard me, and we went to the table where Judy Garland was sitting. Mommie and Aunt Judy hugged each other, and Mommie told her, ‘Cathy was trying to tell me you were here.’ I was proud.
“Sometimes Mommie had to go to work, and my sister and I were left with our governess, who was with us many years and whom we loved. After we went to school, we knew that my mother was famous and successful and that she went to the movie studio to work. She took us to the set. Sometimes she took one of us, sometimes both of us, and we watched her acting. She was making The Best of Everything.
“Mommie was strict. She believed in discipline. I remember once doing something when I was little for which I had to stand in the corner. I don’t remember anymore what it was. I guess we all stood in the corner sometime in our lives. I remember another time, when I said I didn’t like my dinner and I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t have to eat it, but I didn’t get something else. I had to go to bed without dinner. I don’t think it was such a terrible punishment.”
When Cathy and Cindy were teenagers, they went to lunch with Joan at ‘21,’ in New York. “After we were seated,” Cathy said, “the maître d’ brought over a bottle of Coca-Cola and put it at Mommie’s place. We didn’t understand. Mommie waved at a man across the room, and he waved back, acknowledging the bottle of Pepsi-Cola she had sent to his table. Mommie explained to us that he was the president of Coca-Cola, and whenever they were at the same restaurant at the same time, they exchanged colas. After Mommie married Al Steele, she went with him on Pepsi-Cola business trips to Europe or she went to make a movie in England. Whenever we weren’t in school, they sent for us.
“We had one trip for the Christmas holidays to Saint-Moritz, and I liked Gstaad, and we had a wonderful trip to Italy. In Rome, I loved seeing all of the churches and cathedrals.
“I was the luckiest child in the world to have Mommie choose me,” said Cathy. “I wouldn’t have chosen any other mother in the whole world, because I had the best one anyone could ever have. She gave me backbone and courage and so much I could never say it all, but—oh, my gosh—the most important gift she gave me was all of the wonderful memories to last and take me through my life.”
Cathy remembered one of her last visits with her mother, at Joan’s New York City apartment. “There was a lot of pastel yellow and green and white in the apartment. Mommie always took as much California with her as she could.” Cathy had brought her young children, Carla and Casey, with her to see their grandmother. Cathy had continued her mother’s practice of giving her children names that started with C. They were five and four years old.
“They called Mommie JoJo. She liked that. They really loved their grandmother, and she really loved her grandchildren. They were in the next room playing, and Mommie asked me, ‘Do they really think of me as their grandmother?’ She wondered if they understood about adoption. Did they understand the difference in her being their natural grandmother or their adopted grandmother?
“I said, ‘They only think of you as their grandmother.’
“She smiled and looked very pleased.
“Then we heard a sliding noise in the next room. I knew immediately what it was. Mommie had these wonderful parquet floors. She kept them perfectly, the way she always kept everything. Before we’d gone into the building, I’d said to my children, ‘Remember, no sliding. Absolutely no sliding.’ But my children found those parquet floors irresistible.
“I started to get up and said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll tell them to stop.’ Mommie motioned for me not to stop them.
“ ‘No, it’s all right, Cathy. They’re enjoying themselves. Let them slide.’ She paused. Then she said, ‘I’ve mellowed.’ ”
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