The Mommie Dearest Collection by Christina Crawford

Author:Christina Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504049061
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

I hadn’t seen much of my brother during this time. I’d heard that he’d had a bad time of it at his last several schools and been transferred to an eastern boarding school. I knew Chris didn’t particularly like the military academies mother had insisted he go to for their strict discipline. He’d either run away or been expelled from the last two and I wasn’t sure of the exact details. Coincidentally, I’d met a black actor named Rupert Crosse at a party and he’d told me that he knew my brother because he supervised the athletics part time at the school Chris was currently attending. Small world! Because Rupert went up almost every weekend, I asked him to take messages and some small gifts to my brother. It was indirectly through my brother that Rupert and I became friends.

What I didn’t know until years later, thank heavens, was that after the trouble at Chris’s last school in the west, mother was so disgusted that she tried to find someone who would take Chris to Switzerland and leave him there without a passport. She was going to send him to some school in Switzerland and then, by removing his passport, prevent him from re-entering the United States. Chris was fourteen.

Fortunately for all of us, she was unable to find anyone who would go along with her scheme. Many years after the actual occurrence of all this, I was privately impressed that none of the people she must have contacted were willing to do such a thing to a 14-year-old boy, no matter how much money she offered them. I surmised that actually participating in such a scheme was somehow much more offensive than simply turning your back on practices you know are wrong.

I didn’t know about any of this when it was taking place. All I knew was that my brother had been transferred and kept in touch with him through Rupert or personal visits when I could afford the train fare.

On August 14, 1958, my grandmother died. I might not have found out about it at all except that my friend who had promised to visit grandmother, wired me about her death. I think mother was still in Bermuda at the time, or perhaps had just returned to New York when she received the news. The doctors had advised her of grandmother’s serious condition well in advance, but mother had not gone to Los Angeles. Mother did not call me to tell me that grandmother died. She did not ask any of us to attend the funeral. She and daddy flew to Los Angeles, made the arrangements for a closed casket and the burial. I don’t know how long it had been since mother had seen grandmother. I think it was a least several years.

I quit my temporary job at MCA the week the regular receptionist was due to return. Shortly after that I had to tell mother that I didn’t want to return to Neighborhood Playhouse. I

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