I saw this was re-issued for its 40th Anniversary, having spawned a now-considered Camp classic movie, a musical, a sequel or two, a Joan Crawford fan club which doubles as a Christina bashing free for all, the destruction of one of our finest actresses, plus thousands and thousands of commentaries, reviews and a huge cultural shock that caused people to wake up to the existence of something called “Child Abuse.”
Before this book, I’m not sure people were aware of child abuse and psychological torture. Now, of course, if you even dare to touch a stranger, you can practically be thrown in jail (doing nothing, I might add, for the problem of parents abusing their children.)
But ultimately I think she did a great service, albeit unknowingly, by blowing the lid off celebrity adoptions (there have so many: Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, to name three) and child abuse in general — although what I think she describes is probably more like psychological abuse or even psychological torture. The one thing abusive people do is completely destabilized the ground that the abused person lives on. If you are abused or bullied, you never know what will cause the next outburst from this person that you love. That’s why abused people often stay in the situation. Because it can be calm and even loving between the storms.
I think she describes the feeling of feeling trapped by a parent particularly well, and how once she was able to find a small amount of independence, her mother continued to try to shake the foundation of her being, for whatever reason Joan Crawford. The ultimate, or penultimate time this happened, very close to the end of the book, was when Christina moved to Los Angeles to try to look for work and some people she knew, probably through her mother, asked her to look after their car, or offered it to her since nobody can do anything in Los Angeles without a car. For some reason, this enraged her mother, and she insisted that she return the car immediately. Christina couldn’t return the car because there was no one there to take it, so she was ordered by her mother to return the car as soon as they were back. From that point on, it’s not clear that her mother ever spoke to her again, though they exchanged a few short letters. Christina never found out why her mother was so angry, and shortly after this offense, she was told to vacate her mother’s empty West Hollywood apartment because her mother was coming in to do a show. Well once she was out, the locks were changed and Christina stopped getting work which she thought, but couldn’t prove, had something to do with the fear people had of offending her mother. And her mother, who had claimed she needed the apartment for some sort of acting job, never used it. It was a lie to get her out.
To be clear, also, the abuse hurled at Christina by Joan Crawford was abusive of deprivation. Hiding her in a boarding school. Then locking her away in a convent. Always giving her an allowance of just about half of the exact amount she needed. (Sending a child to a boarding school or a convent doesn’t absolve you of your responsibility to care for them by paying for them.)
My big complaint about the book is that it is not well written which is a minor issue for a memoir. It’s written as though a lot of it was dictated, especially at the start of the memoir which jumps around so quickly in time it’s almost as if one memory is triggering another so it’s like she could start off talking about something that happened in the 40s and then that would remind her of something that happened in the 60s and so on. As the book continues, especially after she is sent to boarding school, it hews much more closely with the timeline and the writing also gets better.
The other complaint I have had to do with a number of the most important scenes in the movie — some of which made it the camp classic that it became. One was “Bring me the axe!” In the memoir, this moment is not anchored in a specific time — it’s just presented as ‘one time, I heard noise coming from our beautiful rose garden.’ Joan Crawford was, indeed, cutting down all the rose bushes in the middle of the night, but this fury was not directed at Tina. And when Tina went to see what was happening, Crawford yelled at her to go get the saw. Well, “Tina, bring me the saw,” doesn’t have the same heft or oomph, as “Tina, bring me the axe.” But the latter is melodramatic and camp. Also, I think Faye Dunaway was, as is almost always the case in her work, absolutely brilliant on so many levels in this scene. She understood that Joan Crawford was a fighter and an enraged fighter, but she was also an actor, so when she issues that demand, to “bring me the axe,” she’s not just asking for something to chop down the tree, she’s acting. She’s delivering a line — acting for herself and acting for her daughter and maybe an invisible audience that is always present — (many actors have this invisible audience, and nowadays, with so many people trying to accumulate fans and followers — even more people think constantly about what they will look like when broadcast to their fans). So I think Faye Dunaway was playing that scene on multiple levels: both genuinely enraged and artificially enraged; melodramatic like many of her movies but deadly serious: she absolutely intended to kill that tree, but she also knew how dramatic it was. (If you think about Joan Crawford’s part in “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane,” it is a perfect description of the manipulation that lurked deep inside Joan Crawford herself.) In any event, Christina never said the rose garden incident it was about being labeled “box office poison.” She simply didn’t know why it was happening and though frightening, she didn’t lay a hand on Tina.
There were three more huge scenes in the movie that were also unmoored in the memoir: the Bon Ami cleaning scene, the no wire coat hangers and the most important one, the scene where she got on top of Tina and choked her — tried to murder her. As Christina says now, she was 80 in the interview I read, Joan Crawford wouldn’t be diagnosed with a mental illness, she’d be in jail for attempted murder. (But that, as we know now, is wishful thinking, in this age of “Justice for Thee, but not for me.”)
But for the vast majority of the memoir, there is little contact between mother and daughter. After she sends her away to the Chadwick School, most communication is by letter. After the Chadwick’s she was sent to a convent. After the convent she went to the Carnegie School, then switched to the Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, then quit that and started working fairly regularly, and then some time after the car incident in West Hollywood, quit the business altogether. She was, as is famously known, disinherited from what remained of her mother’s measly estate. 70,000 1978 dollars (about 340,000 today) went to the twins, who completely denied all Christina’s allegations, and another amount went to some charities and I believe a trust was established for one of more of the grandchildren. She made this will about 6 to 8 months before she died, so it was calculated and a big fuck you to Christina and Christopher when she wrote that she did not want them to have any money “for reasons that are known to them.”
Crawford knew this would make the news and that phrase “for reasons that are known to them,” would evoke gossip and speculation and also make her two oldest children the bad guys in this never ending quest to abuse. FFS, she tried to have her son Chris sent to a Switzerland boarding school and to have his passport taken away so that he could not return to the United States. Chris was ultimately disowned by his mother while Christina, like many abused children, kept trying to find love in the volatile relationship.
I think it’s significant that anyone who knew Joan Crawford on a professional level tried to smear Christina, and did the same sort of thing that people did to Anita Hill for telling the truth about Clarence Thomas: attributing all sorts of speculation to “why” Christina wrote the book. The movie, and her memoir, both imply that she would make more money telling the truth than being cut out of the will. But having been cut out of my father’s will — he told us so that it wouldn’t be a surprise — was a gut punch. Your last will and testament is supposed to be your final words on earth: the last things you want to do and say, and if the last thing you want to say is, “I hate you,” and the last thing you do is make that obvious, revenge could have been a reason she wrote the book. “Let’s tell everyone just how warm this iceberg was.” The book sold millions of copies and more after the movie came out, plus the release of the 20th year anniversary as well as the 40th anniversary version I just read. The internet (the all knowing garbage pile) claims she is worth 5 million. I hope so.
Psychological abuse is so much harder to depict, and that may be one of the reasons most of the great scenes from the movie are physical rather than emotional. But, as Andrew Sarris wrote in his headline to his review of the movie in The Village Voice, “I Believe Christina.” The fact that the twins didn’t agree with her, and later sued for defamation (they got a whopping $5,000), just shows that people don’t understand how one child can be abused while a second child can be the apple of daddy’s or mommy’s eye.
I wrote a story about it once. I’ve got to try to find that, because it was a good story. This young girl realizes, while working her shift at a Starbuck’s and after witnessing a young man trip and hit his chin on the floor, that she had lived an enchanted life and conveniently ignored the bruises on her little brother’s body, etc., until he wasn’t there anymore and her “daddy” was in prison.
Writing’s quite bad for the most part, though it gets better as it goes on. It’s long, but memoirs always seem to be too long which is why I don’t often read them. The editing is very poor (do we really need to know how pretty some flowers were? Flowers, dear editors, are always pretty, unless their wilted or dried). But it’s a good read and important, too, because it brought child abuse and psychological torture to our consciousness. Plus she put up with so much anger after it was published. Myrna Loy must have been particularly annoyed.