Joan Crawford's Other Life

Not since Lizzie Borden gave her mother 40 whacks has a daughter wreaked such vengeance on her mother. But instead of using an ax as a weapon, Christina Crawford has wielded a pen--in a book, Mommie Dearest, that is the publishing gossip sensation of the fall season.

The reason for all the interest is that Mommie is the late Joan Crawford, one of the great movie stars of the '30s and '40s, and, if the book is to be believed, also one of the worst parents of all time, a female Jekyll and Hyde capable of the most monstrous cruelty.

Well in advance of its official publication date last week, the book (Morrow; $9.95) was stocked in the stores; 235,000 copies are already in print. Christina got an advance of $225,000 when she turned in her manuscript, and paperback rights were sold for $750,000. In addition, Paramount has bought the movie rights for $300,000; Christina is getting $200,000 to write the screenplay; and her husband, David Koontz, who has produced mostly commercials up until now, is getting another large but undisclosed sum to produce the film. In more than 40 years in Hollywood, Joan herself never saw such a sudden avalanche of dollars.

Joan adopted Christina in 1939, when she was only a few weeks old. Her infant brother, Christopher, was adopted four years later, and two younger sisters, Cathy and Cynthia, were added to the family in 1947. Various husbands and lovers wandered in and out, but none of the children ever had anyone who could pass as a father.

For the first few years of Christina's life, up until the age of five or six, she says, Joan was a warm, loving mother. After that, or about the time Christina began to have an identity and a mind of her own, Joan became a tyrant, and her 22-room Brentwood house a gilded Gulag. Suddenly, spurred on by alcohol, Joan would be seized by fits of madness and would storm through the house, screaming obscenities.

One night Christina had a dispute with her mother about her schooling. Christina said something that "struck at some volcanic trauma in the center of her being that erupted with a violence, a hatred and a suddenness that plunged both of us into an instantaneous struggle for survival. She leaped off the counter and grabbed for my throat like a mad dog. I lost my footing and fell to the floor, hitting my head on the ice chest as I went down. The choking pain of her fingers around my throat met the thudding ache of the blow to the back of my head ... Her mouth was twisted with rage and her eyes--her eyes were the eyes of a killer animal, glistening with excitement."

On another night Chris and Christina were roused from their beds to find a maniacal Joan cutting down her beautiful rose garden. They were then ordered with the servants to cart away the remains. "We were all scratched and bleeding," Christina says, "[but] Mother wouldn't let us stop until we were finished."

Bad as life was for Christina, it was worse for Chris. To smother his boyish spirits, Joan bought a "sleep safe," a harness-like gadget used to keep babies from rolling out of bed. Joan, however, had it modified for a growing boy and strapped Chris into bed every night until he was twelve. If he needed to go to the toilet, he had to call Joan, who was often not around, or persuade Christina to disobey orders and release him.

Throughout the book Christina maintains that she loved her mother, but it is a kind of love that sounds very much like hate. Chris, who is a $200-a-week electrical lineman on Long Island, knows exactly how he feels. "I hated the bitch," a Newsday reporter quotes him as saying. "I honestly to this day do not believe that she ever cared for me." He may very well be right; Joan disinherited both of her older children, leaving them out of an estate estimated at about $2 million. Chris and Christina are now challenging the will in court, claiming that their mother was a "habitual, heavy user of alcohol" who was confused by cancer when she wrote it. They further charge that their sister Cathy and her husband turned their mother against them.

For her part, Cathy, who lives in Allentown, Pa., says that she is "ashamed, heartbroken and disgusted" that the book was ever written. "Christina described my mother as everything horrible. It is so unbalanced! Maybe my relationship with my mother was good and Christina's was not. But I do know that my mother was not a monster."

Why did Christina not write her book when her mother was alive to defend herself? "The story was not yet finished," she replies, somewhat disingenuously. "I had no idea how it would end." Many of Joan's friends, some of whom confirm the basic facts of Christina's grim tale, are nonetheless sorry that it ended this way. "I cried when I read the book," says one of them, Screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass. "But I really cried for Joan. There is an absolute nausea among her friends in learning these things."

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