Mommie Dearest

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The walls are hung with anonymous knick-knacks - a framed print of Shakespeare, a clock that chimes with birdsong on the hour. The Illusion of Perfection: A new diary tells the story of what happened when Faye Dunaway played Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest". It’s said that Crawford knew of the book’s existence before her death in May 1977, but that she’d never discussed it with Christina. In reality, Joan Crawford had four adopted children; however, her other daughters, Cathy and Cindy, are not portrayed or mentioned in the film. Mommie Dearest" has been published three times now; the second being in 1998 for the 20th Anniversary, which included pages that the original publisher kept out of the original edition, that mainly included Christina's adult years with her mother, and the third was published in 2008 for the 30th Anniversary.

Joan Crawford was a woman known for many things: her ongoing feud with Bette Davis; her sexual prowess and ability to control a situation with her femininity; and her charitable missions, which included five private adoptions over the course of her lifetime (her second child, a boy, was reclaimed by his birth mother within a year of the adoption). In securing the rights to the book, Christina's husband David Koontz was given an executive producer credit, though he had no experience producing films. By this time both her parents (a female student who had an affair with a married engineer) were dead. When she was a child, housekeepers, secretaries, nannies and teachers were aware of what was happening, but no one who knew spoke up.

She wrote the musical to explicate more fully her relationship with her brother, Christopher – “how the siblings grow up through the abuse to survive in the real world, with very little going for them except their own love of each other and the will to live”. It is Christina Crawford’s 80th birthday on the day we meet, and she is energetic after an opening night. It is something that you have to live through, and it’s very difficult, because there’s no roadmap for it, even today.

If your mother is drunk and trying to pick a fight, lay low and act nice, don't stand up for yourself and try to make a point!In the years that followed the children of Bette Davis and Bing Crosby wrote similarly excoriating parental memoirs, and the 1981 film adaptation starring Faye Dunaway became a cult hit. To the wider public, Christina’s mother was not the abusive parent, prone to uncontrolled bouts of fury. When the author eventually gains full independence her relationship with her mother eventually changes for the better.

When Christina was 13 years old, she supposedly suffered one final brutal beating from her mother, in which she thought she was going to be choked out.According to Faye Dunaway, producer Frank Yablans promised her during the casting process that he wished to portray Joan Crawford in a more moderate way than how she was portrayed in Christina Crawford's book. She endured and survived, becoming the voice of so many other victims who suffered in silence, and giving them the courage to forge a productive life out of chaos.

Four years after Joan Crawford's death, Blue Öyster Cult released the song "Joan Crawford" as part of their album Fire of Unknown Origin (1981). Book is essentially fine with flaws limited to minor sunning along upper front panel, and one ever so slightly, rounded corner-tip, barely.Joan Crawford’s fits of anger, her drinking and obsession with cleanliness got more pronounced as her career began to unravel. She was helped, rather perversely, by a fear of being incarcerated that grew out of her mother’s constant threats to have her put away. Even with hashtags exhorting people to believe victims, the law still lags and there is a big caveat around domestic abuse, about which people have a tendency to say “who knows what really happened”, says Christina. As chronicled in Mommie Dearest, Crawford slapped, kicked, punched and tried to strangle her daughter, while subjecting her to a severe schedule of cleaning and other household chores, driven by the movie star’s alcoholism and who knows what else.