Shocking and Sensational by Julian Upton

Author:Julian Upton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2018-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

8

Memoirs of a Survivor

Mommie Dearest (1978)

When she died in May 1977, Joan Crawford was revered as one of the Hollywood greats. Her long career had seen as many troughs as peaks, but she had proved herself a hardy survivor of a business in which female stardom had a limited shelf life—no other Hollywood actress had kept her name above the title for as long. A movie star by her mid-twenties, she endured several years as “box office poison” from the mid–1930s before bouncing back in pictures such as George Cukor’s The Women (1939). A subsequent career slump came to an end when she won the Best Actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce in 1945. As she advanced into middle age in the 1950s, her box office appeal began to wane again until What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) put her back in the A-list, albeit briefly. Though her final acting years were spent in low-rent thrillers and horror films, Crawford was, in her dotage, cemented as a symbol of old Hollywood royalty, indelibly linked with her strongest onscreen image, suffering valiantly in high-key melodramas and glossy weepies.

Much of the public affection for Joan Crawford was to be demolished, however, when, a year and a half after her death, her adopted daughter Christina published Mommie Dearest, a shocking memoir of her life with the star. Mommie Dearest powerfully conveyed Christina’s intention to “tell what it was like growing up as a Hollywood child—including the child abuse” (New York Times, January 14, 1979). The book was a sensation, setting a precedent for celebrity-themed “hatchet jobs” and tell-all biographies, which would soon begin to appear with disarming regularity and usually contained deeply unsettling allegations about the behavior of their celebrity subjects. Film critic David Thomson would later write that Mommie Dearest was “arguably, the most influential Hollywood memoir ever published. It changed the way publishers, readers, stars, and [ghostwriters] approached such volumes” (154–55).

Christina Crawford recounted in Mommie Dearest the regular beatings she had received at the hands of her mother. In one humiliating episode when she was four, she was punished for leaving a stain on the wall by being made to wear a tattered dress, one of her favorites that Joan had since cut to ribbons, for an entire week, until it was no more than a soiled rag. Christina wrote that she and her siblings were obliged to whisper while playing, even outside, if their mother was sleeping late (which was often). If this rule was broken, a “vile spanking” would be administered, Christina recalling that Joan “spanked so hard she broke hairbrushes, wooden hangers, and yardsticks across my bottom” (54). She described her brother Christopher having to sleep strapped under a “sleep safe,” a device designed to stop babies falling out of bed, which Joan had had “adapted” for the growing boy, effectively “forcing him to be tied down every night of his life” (60–61). She said when she was nine, her mother punished her for not eating a steak

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