Mommie Dearest

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Which is perfectly fine, but as the reader, I want to have as much fun with the author's revenge as she does. When Dunaway's Crawford, who's a seething volcano of emotions, finally erupts, the effect is laughable, rather than terrifying or pathetic, so pallid is the picture. Christina has repeatedly stated that the film is highly inaccurate, and that the portrayal of her mother in the film is nothing like the real Joan Crawford, emphasizing that she never wrote in her book that Joan chopped down a tree with an axe, or beat her with a wire hanger as depicted in the film.

Generally speaking, we don’t recognise the long-term psychological damage that is inflicted on people who are abused, neglected and trafficked. In 2017 Crawford worked with lyricist and composer David Nehls on a stage musical adaptation of Mommie Dearest, which was produced by Out of the Box Theatrics in New York City.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). LaLonde stated in her lawsuit that during the 20th-anniversary book tour of Mommie Dearest, Christina publicly claimed to interviewers that LaLonde and her twin sister, Cynthia, were not biological sisters and that their adoption was never legal.

Chadwick told Christina not to be so "short-sighted" again, Christina apologized, and that was the end of it, right? Christina says she was once starved for days when she refused to eat an undercooked steak that was still bloody, all in a bid for her mother to further control her. Still, it is possible that a movie star so obsessed with protecting her own image, who was so rigorously perfectionist in all that she did, would go to great lengths to conceal any abusive behaviour from outsiders. Despite a short rapprochement in Joan’s later years, both Christina and Christopher were written out of her will, which stated the decision had been taken ‘for reasons which are well known to them’. It also shed light on the guarded world of Hollywood and stripped away the façade of Christina’s relentless, alcoholic abuser: her adoptive mother, movie star Joan Crawford.They offered her a contract and ran a magazine competition to choose a new name after deciding her surname sounded too much like ‘sewer’. That is the primary reason I have kept Mommie Dearest in constant publication over nearly forty years. She was born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, and her father walked out when she was a few months old. The Illusion of Perfection: A new diary tells the story of what happened when Faye Dunaway played Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest". The 1989 book Daddy's Boy: A Son's Shocking Account of Life with a Famous Father, is a comedic account of Chris Elliott's childhood, with rebuttals from his father, comedian Bob Elliott.

Whatever your opinion of Crawford the actress (and I repeat that I am a huge fan), it is worthwhile to read her daughter's perceptions - not because it should influence your opinion of Crawford's talent, but because it helps to gain a more complete understanding of the very driven, ambitious and probably highly damaged person that rose to the top of the most competitive field in the world: movie stardom.Crawford's other daughters, Cindy and Cathy, have stated many times that they did not witness or experience any of the events described in the book.

Those adults and Christine Crawford's brother concur with the facts about how the tragedies unfolded. Because the parenting situation is different towards them, and that’s a divide-and-conquer type of situation. Among them were Van Johnson, Katharine Hepburn, Cesar Romero, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Sydney Guilaroff, Ann Blyth, Gary Gray, and Myrna Loy. Surely we as a society have evolved enough to know that child abusers can come from any race, any socio-economic circle, any profession - it shouldn't be difficult to believe that movie stars, with their fragile egos and often pathological need to succeed, can have major parenting deficits. In the beginning there were a few hints that Christina Crawford may be heading over-the-top in her prose but as I continued everything seemed relatively plausible and the author relatively level-headed.

It appears that there's even disagreement among the children about where on the scale the blame should be placed. In 1981, Christina had a debilitating stroke, underwent a five-year long recovery and, for the past 25 years, has lived in rural Idaho, writing a series of follow-ups to Mommie Dearest. Cloying, damaged, pathetic, and only partly conscious of her well-earned status as a woman of ill repute, she was also, it seems, a child abuser and eventual alcoholic.