Possessed (33 page)

Authors: Donald Spoto

THERE ARE ALSO ODD
inconsistencies between the horrific discipline and what Christina described elsewhere. “Unexpected moments of real closeness between us always brought tears to her eyes,” Christina wrote about her relationship with Joan. And to a journalist, she said, “Mommie was with me constantly. No matter where she went. When she traveled across the country, I went along too. And she read poetry to me in that marvelous voice of hers—the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the sonnets of Shakespeare. When I learned to read, we took turns reciting stanzas. Mother loved poetry and she wanted me to be exposed to it as early as possible.” When she spoke of Joan’s preoccupation with her career, Christina was, on another occasion, quite understanding: “As I grew older, I saw less and less of Mommie. Not that she didn’t try to give us time. The problem was that she didn’t have that much [time to give]. You can’t build a career like she built and have a great deal of time left over for yourself or anyone else.” That was quite a different tone from the one sounded in
Mommie Dearest.

“We have wonderful memories of holidays and special occasions,” Christina said before she wrote her book. “Sometimes, Mommie used to drive Chris and me to a place called Mandeville Canyon, just ten minutes from the house, and we took a picnic lunch big enough for an army. And when Mommie was working, she always managed to meet us for sodas or lunch downtown. Whenshe was terribly busy at the studio, she took me along onto the set, just so I could be near her.”

These 1960 recollections bear very little resemblance to the Joan Crawford who shrieks and claws her way through the pages of
Mommie Dearest.
When Joan took all the children for a holiday in Northern California each summer, she often offered Christina, as the oldest, some special private time with her mother. “Mommie and I took long walks along the sea wall [in Carmel, California]. We talked a lot, [and] I know that she was telling me important things, but they escaped me because I was too young.”

“I was a strict disciplinarian—perhaps too strict,” Joan admitted not long before her death. “I have had problems with Christina and Christopher, yes, but they have things to answer for, too.” She acknowledged that perhaps actresses like her “should not have had children, whether we bore them or adopted them.” The reason, she believed, was clear: “We didn’t have time for children … and so being a mother was a lousy idea. You
wanted
to be a mother, but there just wasn’t time for it. A part of us [actresses] wanted a real, personal, private life—husband, kiddies, fireplace, the works—but the biggest part of us wanted the career, and that biggest part had to live up to the demands of that career.”

Women and their children have often paid an especially high price for fame and its perquisites. On the one hand, women are encouraged to work, to have careers, to pursue success and even, ultimately, to equal the successes of men. On the other hand, they are pilloried when they do so—or they are soundly criticized for being unable to have intense and successful careers
and
to be entirely present to their children (and husbands) as devoted homemakers. Similar charges are not usually leveled against men.

Celebrity is a jealous mistress, and many actors, while seeking reinforcement of their identities, in fact lose them in a lifelong pursuit of public endorsement and approval; the creation and maintenance of an image require more energy and more subterfuge than most people can supply. And the casualties of this eternal quest are often children. As Joan said, perhaps she ought not to have adopted them. “She was not a maternal person,” according to

Dorothy Manners, who inherited the Louella Parsons column. “It was not her instinct. Adopting those children was the thing to do. Joan was a kind person, but her blind spot was her children.” It seems, then, that there was indeed strict discipline in the Crawford home—but that it was neither as brutal nor as physical as
Mommie Dearest
claims. (By the time Christina was nine, she and Joan fought almost constantly: “I was probably not too pleasant a child,” she admitted.)

Joan never offered excuses for disciplining her children, but she did offer explanations, and they provide an understanding of the period from 1948 to 1951. As she often said, she wanted to give her children everything she had been denied: she wanted to erase her own past by raising the children both properly and luxuriously—and with the discipline necessary to prevent them from being spoiled.

It is important to recall that Joan’s only frame of reference for motherhood was the experience of her own early years. Anna was a distant, unhappy single parent who preferred Hal to Lucille and never hesitated to slap her daughter’s face, and the headmistress at Rockingham was frankly cruel in administering corporal punishment. In other words, Joan had only her own past on which to base decisions about child rearing. And she had to make these decisions as a single parent.

Joan hated her past. But as often happens, she recreated its circumstances in order to reverse it once and for all. It is also worth nothing that, from this time in her life, she very rarely undertook a sympathetic movie role. Unhappy with her past and with what she had become, she would not permit the children to repeat those realities. Just as Joan saw abandoned, unwanted children as mirrors of herself—babies who needed to be “saved"—so there was a dark side to her intentions. Because she saw them as little versions of her earlier self, discipline was a way of negating that person. With goodwill, she adopted children in order to save them from a childhood like her own. But she so resented that childhood that she tried to erase its signs and symbols. The discipline, in other words, was a way of preventing her own children from becoming distorted versions and repetitions of Joan Crawford. But the forms of thediscipline were not, it seems almost certainly, the hideously cruel versions set forth in
Mommie Dearest.

Joan gave her children everything she never had; on the other hand, she feared that they would grow up like other Hollywood children—with too many material things and not enough self-reliance. Some Hollywood children have coped poorly in dealing with the fame of their parents; some have resented their parents’ fame and deplored the fact that equal fame was denied them. “Joan never complained about her difficult children,” recalled Myrna Loy, who knew the entire family over many decades. “Christina and Christopher made me glad I didn’t have children.”

Elva Martien, frequently Joan’s movie costumer, was also familiar with the Crawford household; she insisted that Joan “loved those children and was really a devoted mother. She felt that her kids, when they grew up and went off on their own, might not be able to afford a grand Hollywood lifestyle. She wanted them to be able to go out and face the real world, and that’s what she tried to prepare them for.” Director Herbert Kenwith knew Joan over many years and often visited the house. “Joan demanded perfection and could be rigid with her children,” he recalled, “but the things Christina alleged just never happened.” And Cindy Crawford offered firsthand testimony: “Mommy was a disciplinarian because she wanted us to grow up independently—self-reliant and with good goals. We had a maid and a cook, but we had to make our beds and wash our dishes. She wasn’t the kind of person Christina wrote about. She was very caring and loving.”

WHATEVER THE EXTENT OF Joan’s discipline with Christina and Christopher, her tactics had changed by the time the twins were out of infancy. Cathy and Cindy Crawford always insisted that they had a loving home life without any of the harsh treatment Christina described. “I think Christina was jealous,” said Cindy Crawford years later. “She wanted to be the one person she couldn’t be—Mother. But our mother was very good to us—I think she was good to all four of us, really. She cared for us. We grew up knowing what was right and what was wrong.”

“My mother was a very warm person,” added Cathy, speaking for both twins. “She was always there when we needed her. She was a working mother, but she always had time for us, and as far as
Mommie Dearest
is concerned, it’s a great work of fiction. Christina must have been in another household. She says Joan was rotten, but I say she was a good person. She was tough on us, sure—you’d get a swat once in a while, but there were none of those physical beatings. Christina committed matricide on Mother’s image.” After working as the first editor of
Mommie Dearest,
Judy Feiffer felt that “Christina had, in a way, tried to be Joan.” One might add that when Christina realized that effort was futile, she killed Joan off—in her book.

The twins recalled that indeed Joan was “strict—she believed in discipline,” as Cathy recalled, but she insisted that they were “the luckiest [children] in the world—I wouldn’t have chosen any other mother, because I had the best one anyone could ever have. She gave me backbone, courage and wonderful memories to last all through my life.” According to Betty Barker, who worked for Joan for forty years, Joan was “never out of control. I never saw her do anything wrong with her children—I would swear to that. She deserved a lot better than she got back from the two older children she adopted.”

Book reviewers were not impressed by
Mommie Dearest.
“Everything about the book tastes bad,” wrote the senior critic for the
New York Times,
“from its whining, self-dramatizing tone to its seizures of preposterous stuffiness.” The public, however, grabbed it from bookstore shelves, and within two years it had sold several million copies.

PERHAPS FROM SHEER DESPERATION
over the problems with Greg Bautzer and her two older children—and impelled by the need for income—Joan returned to work in the autumn of 1948, after more than a year’s absence. According to the terms of her contract, Joan was paid only when she actually worked; otherwise, she was formally placed on suspension. She had, therefore, given up a year’s salary to be a stay-at-home mother, but this had put her in a precarious financial position.

The project Warner Bros. prepared for her, based on Robert Wilder’snovel and play
Flamingo Road,
had been offered to various producers, directors and actors, but it had interested no one. Then, anticipating success if he reteamed Joan with Michael Curtiz and Zachary Scott, producer Jerry Wald swung into action with determination. Unfortunately, he miscalculated. “The script missed,” Joan said accurately. “Curtiz missed. I missed. My judgment screwed up completely.”

Over the years, many of Joan’s fans championed
Flamingo Road,
but it is difficult to endorse their passionate defense of it. Cast as a down-at-the-heels carnival dancer, Joan was forty-two and playing twenty years younger—but there were worse obstacles to its success. The story and screenplay are a tedious muddle about political machinations in a southern backwater. Will Joan save Zachary Scott from the wicked Sydney Greenstreet? Can she stand by politician David Brian as he tries to rise above scandals? Could she transcend dialogue in which “I’m not sure” is her most repeated assertion? Did anyone care? Vaguely resembling the road-company version of a bad Lillian Hellman play,
Flamingo Road
seems to be about political corruption; it is really, however, about Joan’s new blond hairdo. But by this time, her name on theater marquees was enough to attract audiences, despite the warnings of reviewers that her role was “utterly nonsensical and undefined,” as one of the kinder notices put it.

With that turgid melodrama behind her, Joan very much enjoyed working for one day on a Technicolor picture called
It’s a Great Feeling.
With cameo appearances by Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan, Michael Curtiz, Danny Kaye and a dozen other Warners players, this movie was one of the few successful satires on Hollywood. In a parody of herself, Joan is seen wrapped in furs as she approaches Doris Day, Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan:

JOAN: You two boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Just think of what you’re doing to that poor innocent little girl! CARSON: But, Joan—you don’t understand! JOAN-Two grown men, acting like—grown men!