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Entertainment July 10, 2017
Hollywood was not all glitz and glamor for Joan Crawford's daughter.
In the Old Hollywood film buff community, Joan Crawford was essentially an idol.
With the American Film Institute ranking her as the tenth greatest female star of Classic Hollywood cinema, her cinematic legacy has proven to be timeless. One of these legacies is her daughter, Cristina Crawford. However, the legacy that Cindy released was a little less glamorous.
According to her bestselling memoir “Mommie Dearest,” Cristina Crawford does not remember Joan as the gentle, gracious ingenue that Hollywood revered. In fact, Cristina recounts her adoptive mother as horribly abusive with tumultuous, unpredictable mood swings.
The book delivered a harsh blow to the Hollywood nostalgics, especially those who imagined Joan’s private life to be as glamorous as her public one. Since the book’s release in 1978, Cristina has been relatively quiet about the issue.
However, in a revealing interview on “The Phil Donahue Show,” her answers were not restrained. Much of the stress of her childhood came from the hysteria of fame surrounding their family, and the lack of tools in how to deal with such dangerous attention.
“It was outside the 21 club and they had to get the police. The woman who took care of us got hurt and had to be taken to the hospital. I was absolutely terrified. I had a hold of my little brother’s hand, he was about four. The two of us just held onto each other.”
This was Cristina’s response to the question, “Do you remember the limousines and the riots?” Cristina Crawford sat on a panel with her adopted siblings. Her brother, Christopher, and received some of the worst physical abuse from their mother. Cristina reported her brother being tied to his crib while the crimes proceeded.
“I was forced to watch when he was beaten. So I ended up feeling responsible because I was too little, I couldn’t help him.”
According to Cristina, one of the main family dynamics that was missing was communication. Tantrums went unexplained, rampages went undiscussed, and the children were not given tools to handle Joan’s conflicting personalities.
Their mother justified her actions with silence, as though they had never happened. This resulted in a blurred line between fantasy and reality for Cristina and her siblings.
“My mother was an alcoholic at the time, and she would go on rampages. But the next morning it was never discussed. So what I knew to be reality was treated as though it didn’t exist.”
However, Joan identified herself as the victim of indifference. According to the mother’s perspective, Cristina was a child who constantly rejected her mother’s attempts to console her, and ultimately surrendered to estrangement.
These statements are just a glimpse into the horrors Cristina details. However, when Vanity Fair interviewed Joan before cancer took her life in 1977, she told an entirely different story.
“I wanted to share everything I had with her, but I couldn’t reach or influence her.”
The interview painted a completely new picture of Joan — the barren mother who took in four orphans as her own, who would have helped with anything her children needed. However, she seems to exhibit the same pain as Cristina — as though the abuse had been done to her.
Joan admitted that her relationship with her daughter would be the same if the book had never been written: “The problem was I adopted her, but she didn’t adopt me.”
So here are two estranged relatives… a mother and daughter separated by silence for years, both feeling irreversibly wrong by the other. The conflict becomes a question of honesty — are both lying, or is one telling more truth than the other?
Either way, the ending is not fulfilling. Cristina’s mother can no longer explain her reasons, and Cristina will not be able to explain hers. Who knew what they could have said to one another, given a few moments of honesty without pride.
