Mommie Dearest
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Mommie Dearest is a memoir and exposé written by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of actress Joan Crawford, that was published in 1978.
Presented by its author as non-fiction, the book depicts Christina's version of her childhood and her relationship with her mother. She alleges that for many years she was the victim of child abuse during her mother's battle with alcoholism. The message she conveys is that her mother cared more about her motion picture career than she did for her children, Christina and Christopher, and that she had adopted them only for publicity purposes. Besides a long list of affairs with men, that Christina said she was required to call uncles, she also made allegations that Joan was involved in sexual acts with other women.
Friends of Joan were shocked by the book and its tales of outrageous cruelty. Many called it fictitious, attacking Christina's honesty and maintaining that her claims are not corroborated with evidence. Myrna Loy, Joan's friend since 1925, became one of her staunchest defenders in the aftermath of the book and the tarnishing of her carefully created image. Loy said that she had personally observed bad behavior on the part of Christina on numerous occasions, both during her childhood and when she was completely independent of her mother; especially during the Chicago stage production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, which Loy and Christina both appeared in. Loy said she believed Christina's motivation in writing the book was nothing more than her jealousy that she could never achieve the level of success or adulation that her mother had achieved.
Some biographers have also stated that in the subsequent retelling of events she has written about, Christina is particularly weak in recalling sequences of events and dates and that the substance of particular stories changes significantly in the retelling. They have accused her of fabricating some of her anecdotes and, while acknowledging that Joan Crawford was a highly ambitious woman and was an alcoholic for most of her life, have also suggested that Christina largely embellished the areas of her story where she had legitimate grievances. Perhaps most tellingly, the two younger Crawford children, Cindy and Cathy, who grew up in the Crawford household from the late 1940s, have stated categorically many times that they did not witness any events as described in the book, even though they were there, and have distanced themselves from their elder sister.
But some of Joan's friends later stated that the book had changed their opinion of her. The damage was done, right or wrong, and Crawford's name has become a byword for parental abuse and cruelty.
Christina has stood by her story, releasing a "Twentieth Anniversary Edition" with one hundred pages of additional material, and in the years since the original book was published she has acquired a large number of supporters who accept her story at face value, as well as an equally large group of detractors who do not.
See also
- Mommie Dearest (motion picture)
External links
- AllReaders.Com Book Review of Mommie Dearest (http://www.allreaders.com/Topics/Info_25880.asp)
- The Hollywood Reporter.com on the book Mommie Dearest (http://bbs.hollywoodreporter.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB3&Number=6254&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=6&o=&fpart=1)
- Amazon.com: Editorial Reviews: Mommie Dearest (20th Anniversary Edition) (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0966336909/103-7665015-7431052?v=glance&vi=reviews)