"Surviving Mommie Dearest" : Joan Crawford's home movies

Broadway, hide your wire coat hangers. Joan Crawford’s daughter, Christina Crawford, is developing a one-woman show where she not only plans to reveal new secrets about her life with Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford, but also show never before seen home movies of the screen legend in the nude.

More gory details here

Well, the money from the books had to run out at some point.

Christina Crawford and her exploits make me ill. I don't think Joanie was up for any mother of the year awards, but Mommie Dearest is ridiculous. There may be grains of truth there (what can you expect from a movie star?) but the rest is the result of an overactive and money-grubbing imagination.

Exactly my thought. Better she should spend some of that money on therapy.

*yucky* Blechk
No form of child abuse is acceptable obviously but i do believe that sometimes our perception of how we were disciplined is exaggerated in our minds and I believe this is the case here. I have some friends who all grew up in the same home (siblings) and they all pretty mcuh have one view of how they were raised except for one of them, who claims that the discipline they received as children was abuse. The abuse she claims is spankings, (it was the 70's) being sent to bed without dinner, groundings, what she calls hard labor and others see as chores and items and privileges being taken away. She does not claim that she was treated any differently than her siblings but she sees the discipline as abuse where as the others do not. its all about perception in these types of cases I believe. However this post is not meant to discount or make light of real abuse which sadly many children silently endure daily.
I agree lizzie she needs to get to therapy.

LizzieMaine said:

Exactly my thought. Better she should spend some of that money on therapy.

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Her story seemed to be an anger driven and exploitive. While I have no question that in the course of their relationship there were tempestuous moments, I do beleive the timing of her original book was questionable. As I look at her varied career and somewhat storied life I too suggest she take some time off and relax on a psychiatrist's couch for a while.

Joan was creepy there's no doubt about it.

But man, was she dramatic in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane!

Sam

I don't know. If she says life with Joan was like that, then I believe her. I have personal experience, and I know more than one friend who was abused as a child, much worse than what I saw in the movie Mommy Dearest. When a child is grade-school age or younger, and the parent(s) keep him or her isolated (not the case in the movie), the child will believe the treatment/abuse is normal and they deserve it because he or she is a "bad" kid.

If the kid is making it all up, then that is a red flag that something is wrong also.

A quote above - "I don't know. If she says life with Joan was like that, then I believe her."

Why believe her? That's only one side of the story, told about a dead woman who can't defend herself, by a daughter cut out of the will.


Interestingly enough, some of the stories Christina related involving her late mother and others who WERE alive when the book came out didn't pan out. Incidents Christina reported and what happened weren't not how the others present at the incident say they happened. Many said they were fabrications. Many, many Hollywood celebrities came to Joan's defense saying the allegations were utter nonsense.

Joan's other children also deny the incidents happened or that abuse happened, and said there were private reasons why Christina & Christopher were cut out of the estate. Crawford's will said exactly that - she made no provision for them due to reasons that they were well-aware of.

So now, thirty years after the initial book, she's coming out with even more shocking (yawn!) revelations about life with Joan and now she's found some secret nude film footage. An attention-seeking, no talent, star-wanna-be has spent decades milking this same old story to death. At some point, no matter what kind of childhood you've had, you have to stand up and start taking responsibility for yourself and quit crying over water decades-ago under the bridge. I'm sure, at best, this gets a tepid reception and she'll have to think of some other fantastic story to keep the money rolling in. "Joan Crawford was really a man!" or "Joan Crawford was a space alien!"