Mommie Dearest

"Anita Loos recounts the very early stages of what became known as the Hollywood studio system. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, that system produced glamorous film stars whose images were protected and massaged by the studios that made them famous. Then, in the 1960s, the studio system began to collapse, a fitting event for an era known for its young people’s willingness to question authority and established institutions. This led to a growing interest in the seamy underbelly of glamorous celebrity. Mommy Dearest, published in 1978, appeared at a pivotal moment in the history of celebrity, and also helped to change celebrity culture. Christina Crawford’s book helped create a public as fascinated with celebrities going bad as with celebrities being good—a public obsessed with celebrity scandal and with exposing the flawed person behind the beautiful image. Joan Crawford was one of the great stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Born in 1904, her heyday was the 1930s, when she became known as someone who had made herself a star from nothing. She was not trained in any way. She just came to Hollywood and clawed her way to the top and then had an extremely glamorous image that she protected. She presented herself as someone who was able to become and stay a star by virtue not only of talent, but also of hard work and discipline. “Christina Crawford’s book helped create a public as fascinated with celebrities going bad as with celebrities being good” In the 1940s, however, Joan Crawford was labeled box office poison along with other stars like Mae West and Katharine Hepburn—mostly women, mostly very strong women. Her career started to collapse. At that time she adopted, in fairly quick succession, four children. It was illegal then for single women to adopt, but she managed to get around that. In this book, her oldest adopted daughter revealed what had been an open secret in Hollywood for many years: Joan Crawford was a physically and emotionally abusive parent. The stories are horrific. I don’t want to dwell on them, but I think it’s important to give examples because the level of abuse was very, very serious. She routinely tied her son to the bed at night when he was as young as four years old and would not allow him to get up to use the bathroom. Once, when she caught him playing with matches in front of dinner guests, she marched him out to the dining room, lit a match, and held his hand over it until his skin burned. Another time, photographers were at Crawford’s house taking pictures of her because the studio had named her ‘mother of the year.’ Christina and her younger brother were playing and Christina accidentally caught her brother’s hand in a door. He cried out and this disrupted the photo shoot. Joan Crawford’s response was to take Christina’s hand, put it in the door, and close the door deliberately on her hand. These stories in particular are important because people were present and later corroborated them. Christina Crawford had several goals in writing Mommie Dearest. She wanted to bring the fact of child abuse to national attention and point out that it’s not only poor people or the mentally ill or drug addicts who abuse their children. Even the most privileged people can be perpetrators. By raising awareness of the prevalence of child abuse in all classes and by helping child abuse survivors to come together, Crawford produced real change. “Crawford also considers the desire to be a celebrity a form of pathology that converges with abuse” Christina Crawford also set out to expose celebrity as what she calls ‘the big lie.’ She points out that celebrity exists not only because celebrities themselves exist and publicity machines exist, but also because the public buys into stardom as a fantasy of perfection. She sees it as her job to make us question our need to idealize celebrities, and to show that celebrity itself can be an abuse of power. Her mother was able to get away with abusing her children in the full sight of people that she worked with, because as a celebrity no one wanted to expose her. People were afraid that if they confronted her, they’d lose their jobs. Christina Crawford also considers the desire to be a celebrity a form of pathology that converges with abuse. If you’re the child of a celebrity who abuses you, you’re going to be very sensitive to the ways that those two things interact, but not all celebrities are child abusers and many child abusers are not celebrities. Christina Crawford sees stardom and child abuse both as forms of bullying and gaslighting; Joan Crawford thought she could make up her own rules and force people to believe in her lies: ‘I’m a great mother, I’m Mommie Dearest, I’m wonderful.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Christina Crawford tries to empathize with her mother; she sees Joan Crawford as driven by a bottomless need for love that meant she couldn’t really deal with other people as full human beings. This was another way that her celebrity coincided with her pathology. Joan Crawford, as her daughter portrays her, was most comfortable when people were in the position of fan. She actually had several fans who worked for her, for free, cleaning her floors and helping to answer her fan mail. Christina’s analysis of Crawford as a mother is that she wanted her children to be fans as well. But even as Christina Crawford denounces celebrity as, at best, covering up abuse and, at worst, itself a form of abuse, she is fully aware of how to work the celebrity machine. She talks at many points in the book about how her mother taught her about the press’s fascination with celebrities. She had to know that her status as the daughter of a celebrity would be crucial to the success of her book. There are hundreds of thousands of abusive parents and abused children; few of them are famous. If someone had written a book like Mommie Dearest about an abusive parent who was not in the public eye, it would not have received the same attention. Christina Crawford cannily used her very painful but insightful experience of celebrity culture to turn celebrity into a platform for bringing attention to a huge social problem that people had been reluctant to confront. Many people do really bad things and get away with them. Unfortunately, privileged, wealthy, connected people, in whom a lot of industries have a vested interest, are even more able to get away with crimes than others. Anita Loos talks about a famous case in the 1920s in which a comic actor raped a woman, who died as a result. Loos reports how the actor, though acquitted in the courts, saw his career destroyed as a result of the scandal. She drily remarks, “Hollywood incorrectly inferred from this that notoriety and scandal would hurt their stars and that stars were not above the law.” In fact, she says, stars often were treated as above the law, not least because the public likes notoriety and scandal. Her example is Elizabeth Taylor, whose involvement with married men made the public more interested in her. But while stealing other women’s husbands is not a moral thing to do, it’s not a crime. It doesn’t violate someone else’s entire sense of physical and psychological selfhood. What Michael Jackson did, what Joan Crawford did—those are actual crimes for which people can and should be sentenced to prison time. So, on the one hand, people let celebrities get away with things that they shouldn’t. On the other hand, when the celebrities are brought to account—often, unfortunately, after their deaths and after the damage is done—it does raise awareness in a way that ordinary cases don’t. She was trolled, to use a more contemporary term, by people who she called ‘angry disbelievers.’ A later edition of the book includes testimony from people who knew her at the time who were willing to go on record about what they had witnessed. It was not a secret that Joan Crawford abused her children: she did it in front of other people and people knew about it. Even in an era where corporal punishment and very strict treatment of children were quite common, people referred to Joan Crawford as a cruel and bizarre parent. It’s not a very well-written book, and there are some shocking spelling mistakes. But it is readable, because Crawford is a very emotionally present narrator. The book is also very balanced, considering what she went through. She makes an effort to understand what her mother was going through and what her mother’s psychology was, while at the same time being very open about her rage at the abuse she suffered. It’s quite common for children who are never allowed to express a full range of emotions as children to have a lot of rage bottled up inside them. Christina Crawford writes often about how angry she was, and still is at the time of writing. She doesn’t try to sugarcoat herself. The book doesn’t read like an exercise in self-justification, or even as an act of pure vengeance. She also doesn’t try to hide that there’s an element to this book that’s about settling the scores. She’s setting the record straight. Her mother spent decades telling one story, a false story, and she’s going to tell a story that she believes—I think accurately—is more true. That makes for a compelling read."