During the months of my infancy she showered me with the pent up outpouring of love and affection that had been stifled in her for so many years. Better still, she didn’t have to share me with anyone … I was hers alone. She was the wellspring from which all love and affection flowed and I was her longed for golden-haired girl. She named me after herself and through the lavish affection, attention and adornment she showered upon me, she tried to make up for the poverty of her own childhood. I was to be the best, the most beautiful, the smartest, quickest, most special child on the face of the earth. I wanted for nothing … toys, clothes and baby jewelry. She was constantly holding me and looking at me and trying to make my sparse hair grow into golden ringlets. Whenever she didn’t take me to the studio, she would rush home in time to feed me and give me my bath. She would sing lullabies to me and rock me to sleep.
In truth, I was adorable. I also became quite spoiled under the constant tutelage of all this attention. I had everything … companionship which played endlessly with me and took care of me in the form of my nurse and an adoring, indul-gent mother who couldn’t resist anything I asked for from her. In return she had my total devotion. The sun rose and set on my beautiful goddess of a mother. Her laughter was the music of my life and the sound of her heart beating as she held me close to her made me feel safe and quiet. I sobbed whenever she left me even for a little while and I clung to her skirts if there were new people around. I learned very quickly to be adorable for company. I was very bright and seemed to know what pleased the big people. Everyone cooed over me and said what an absolutely beautiful child I was. I learned to walk and talk very rapidly.
The laws of the State of California did not permit a single woman to adopt children. So, when I was eleven months old, mother took me to Las Vegas, Nevada and legally adopted me in May, 1940. At some point before the final papers were signed, mother had come to the conclusion that Joan Crawford, Jr. was not exactly fitting. She chose a new name for me and the adoption papers record the name as Christina Crawford.
In exchange for their more liberal adoption laws and a substantial fee, the state of Nevada attempted to provide some measure of future protection for the adopted children. Since mother was a single woman and if anything should happen to her there would be no one to provide for me, it was decided that a trust fund should be set up in my name. The court felt assured that this compromise was in the best interests of all concerned and dispatched its duty accordingly. During my early childhood I heard numerous references to the trust fund and mother said she periodically put the gifts of money her friends sent to me on special occasions in that trust.
For some reason I’ve never discovered, we went from Las Vegas to Miami, Florida. Curiously, mother had never mentioned going to Miami. I discovered that we had been there for several weeks only when I went to Miami as an actress to do my first picture in 1960. There I was interviewed by a woman reporter who told me that she had interviewed mother 20 years before and that she’d met me originally as a small baby. She didn’t seem to have any explanation for our trip except that mother had said at the time that she was on a much needed vacation. It wouldn’t seen so peculiar except that we drove the entire way. In 1940 there was a war going on and gasoline was rationed. There were no freeways and it was most unusual for a woman alone with an eleven month old baby to drive nearly three thousand miles. But that is evidently what we did.2
From Miami we went to New York City where I celebrated my first birthday. The New York contingent of fans were there and a few of mother’s close friends. We stayed in the Sherry Netherlands hotel and then mother took an apartment on East End Avenue which she kept for many years. I had a nurse named “Aunt Kitty” and everyday she would take me in my big black English perambulator to Schultz park on the East River. I was always dressed in organdy pinafores and by then had a full head of blonde ringlets. The fans were specifically forbidden to take pictures of me, but somehow they managed to hide the cameras and snap the contraband photos anyway.
During our stay in the east mother took me to visit some Christian Science friends of hers who owned a beautiful dairy farm in upstate New York. I was still very little and when mother and I and the daschund dog named “Pupschien” went for our walks through the fields surrounding her friends’ house, she often had to carry me a good part of the way. One afternoon we had gone for one of these walks in the lovely countryside and I was toddling along beside mommie as we watched the short-legged dog leaping through the long grass and disappearing momentarily in between each bound. All of a sudden mother let out a scream of terror and already on the run swooped me up in her arms. Mommie was running for her life and I was hanging onto her body with my arms and legs like a little monkey. She ran at breakneck speed through the long grass, the dog doing his best to keep up with us. At some point, though I was bobbing up and down with the motion of mother’s running, I caught sight of an enormous black animal that was chasing us! I could hear the thundering sound of it’s feet hitting the ground, sensing that the huge beast was gaining on us.
Ahead, about a hundred yards, was a long fence. Mother headed straight for it. Seemingly out of nowhere, Aunt Peggy appeared near the fence calling encouragement to mommie. Aunt Peggy yelled: “Remember Joan, God is love.” Through her accelerated breathing and never missing a beat in her stride, mommie yelled back: “Damn it Peggy, God is love on the other side of the fence! A moment or so later, mommie clambered to safety through that fence dragging me with her. She fell exhausted on the soft grass crying and laughing at the same time. Aunt Peggy tried to comfort both of us and make sure we hadn’t been hurt. The poor little dog collapsed in a heap, panting rapidly. We looked back toward the field and there behind the fence weighing over 2,000 pounds was a champion breeding black bull with a ring through his nose, snorting and pawing the ground. Mother didn’t say another word, but gathered me up and walked with Aunt Peggy back to the farmhouse. That was definitely the end of our walks in the country.
Before we left New York we went to visit Helen Hayes in Nyack on the Hudson River. She and her husband, Charles MacArthur, had two children. The oldest was a girl named Mary who later died of polio and the younger a boy named James but whom we called Jamie. Jamie was just a couple of years older than I but the difference at that point was considerable, since I was still confined to a baby carriage. Jamie tried to entertain me while the grownups visited and he wheeled me in my carriage out into the garden. I was going through a stage when I was very big on kissing but Jamie wasn’t too thrilled about that and set off to gather me flowers. I wasn’t used to being left alone and after a short while began to cry. The sound of my crying brought the desired attention from my mother and also from Jamie. He rushed back with some flowers for me. In an attempt to please me and also hush me up, he presented me with a large rose which he stuck right in my face! The perverse humor of adults being what it is, they were delighted with this unexpected comedy and took several snapshots of the event. The more they laughed the louder I cried and the harder Jamie tried to shut me up. Not an auspicious romantic debut on my part, to say the least.
Mother and I departed for California soon after that visit. Aunt Helen always sent us lovely Christmas and birthday presents and we corresponded fairly regularly in later years. Helen Hayes was one of the people mother truly respected and admired. They became friends when mother was just starting out as a chorus girl and sent to see everything Helen Hayes did on Broadway. Lynne Fontaine and Alfred Lunt were the other two Broadway stars that mother loved and idolized. They all were to remain lifelong friends, a friendship built on mutual admiration.3
Mother and I returned to California and she went back to work. Strange Cargo and Susan and God were released in 1940 and in Strange Cargo she was again teamed with Clark Gable. Even though I was very little I remember Gable’s visits to the house during the next two years. He seemed like a giant to me and had the most wonderful hearty laugh. Mother and he resumed their romance I think but again it was not destined
to be any lasting romantic relationship. Mother once said Gable was only interested in women who weren’t available. Mother had her own problems with the relationship because as much as she yearned for and was attracted to strong men, deep down inside I think she only wanted men she could dominate. That definitely was not Clark Gable. He was known as a man’s man, a sportsman and a lover. Gable had a spirit and a verve for living that set him apart. Although their love affair was relatively brief, mother spoke of Gable with a special fondness and respect for the rest of her life. When asked by interviewers who her favorite leading man or male Hollywood star was she usually put Gable at the top of the list. Maybe it was because she never did manage to outshine him professionally nor dominate him personally that she retained her respect and love for him over a span of nearly 30 years.
During 1941 and 1942 she did two pictures a year under her Metro contract. But though she continued working she knew that her career was not going forward. The scripts were trite and the majority of her time was spent changing costumes. The reviews mentioned her clothes more than her acting and with a war in progress the reviews were often snide about the abundance of fabric available to dress her while the rest of the country scrimped and saved for the war effort. Above Suspicion was her last film for MGM. After 17 years under contract to the same studio, the studio that had seen her develop from a brash flapper into a major star, the studio that had been her home, was now an adversary and she knew she was loosing the battle.
Finally, she left and signed a contract with Warner Brothers for far less money than she’d been getting at MGM. Warner Brothers was to be an entirely new battle for her. She didn’t have the ensconced niche that she’d gotten used to at Metro. She didn’t know everyone and all the little stories of their past. She was not part of the family on this new lot and she still had to do battle with the senior producers and Jack Warner himself. The scripts they submitted were worse in her opinion that the ones she’d refused to do at Metro. What an irony that she had left one studio because of the poor quality material she was offered only to be given worse trash at Warner’s. With the exception of Hollywood Canteen, a lavish propaganda movie featuring every star on the Warner’s payroll, she didn’t work at all for nearly three years.
I think when she married Phillip Terry in 1942 who at that time was a handsome but relatively unknown actor in his early thirties, she knew that her days at Metro were numbered. Mother had only been divorced for three years but I don’t think she liked being alone so much. I think that for all the admirers and servants she was just downright lonely. By her own admission she never loved Phillip enough to have warranted marrying him and he certainly wasn’t powerful enough to do anything for her career, so loneliness and a certain boredom are really the only answers left. Mother needed companionship and she needed an audience to reassure her that she was loved. She had an insatiable need for love and attention.
Phillip was the second husband who came to live with her in her house at 426 North Bristol where he had his own suite of a large bedroom and dressing room-bath. It always seemed that he was more of a guest than a part of the household and he never really had any say in how things were to be run. It must have been very demoralizing for him and I’m sure that had he known what he was getting himself involved in, he never would have married mother.
In 1943, Joan and Phillip together, adopted a boy whom they named Phillip Terry, Jr. I do not remember the marriage day but I certainly remember the night my second baby brother arrived.
I was asleep in the bit four-poster bed with the white organdy canopy. I heard voices and woke up slowly. There was a light on in the room and I could see the shadows of several people standing around the crib across from my bed. The people were whispering. I sat up. Everyone turned around. I scrambled out of bed and ran over to the crib to peer through the railing. I was about three and a half and not yet tall enough to see much in the semi darkness. Someone picked me up so that I could see better. I looked down and there he was … a fat smiling baby brother. I wanted to touch him. He looked just like a big doll with his blue eyes and blonde curls.
I touched him and he started crying! It startled me and I nearly fell into the crib with him. Everyone seemed upset with me and back into my own bed I went. That baby cried for quite a long time. Everyone was fussing and cooing over him and saying how beautiful he was. They told me to go back to sleep and left.
The door to my room was always left open and the hall light burned all night because I was afraid of the dark. Sometimes the dolls on the shelves in my room would dance in the shadows and I would be scared of them. Sometimes there were wolves under my bed and I’d have to lie very still so they wouldn’t know I was there. Sometimes I lay so still it was like I was frozen. I don’t think I was so scared of the dark before I started sleeping in the big four-poster bed. At first I used to have nightmares and fall out of it. Mommie would come running from her room. I would be screaming. It was quite a distance to the floor … I had to use a step stool to get into bed.
I would have the same dream. I’d been kidnapped by a band of men on horses. Mommie was trying to find me. The man and horses would stop to rest. I could hear mommie … she was just around the bend in the road … she was coming to rescue me. But, just as I could actually see her, the men would scoop me up and ride off. Then I would be crying and fall out of bed.
I had not made up the entire kidnap terror. Only a few years before I was born, the Lindbergh kidnapping was a national tragedy. Then before this baby brother arrived, there had been another one. His name was Christopher and he hadn’t been with us very long when his real mother came and wanted him back. It was a terrible scene with screaming and shouting and a lot of running around. But she did get her son back and we were without a Christopher. From that time on, mother changed the birthdates on the certificates. Not on mine but on brother Phillips’ and later on the twins. Evidently there had been some publicity on the first Christopher which had given the real birthdate and through that story the real mother found him. So … Phillip’s birthday was the 15th of October and the twins was on the 15th of January, but that wasn’t the real day of their birth in either case. Mother and Phillip Terry adopted Phillip Jr. together, but I was still mother’s alone.4
Baby brother and I didn’t get along too well at first. He would cry and I’d want to get out of bed and punch him. But soon we began to work it out and I realized that I had a wonderful real life toy to play with. I dressed him up and wheeled him around in his buggy. I helped give him baths and feed him, just like with my dolls. When he got old enough to stand up in his playpen, he would put on a real show. He hated the playpen and would stamp his feet and hold onto the bars jumping up and down like a monkey. He broke three play pens beyond repair before the grown-ups finally gave up on them.
He and I were inseparable. We shared the same bedroom and the same bathroom until I was a teenager and used to lock him out. I got him to play all my games. I was teacher or chief or the boss and he was whatever else there was to be. He got mad at me for being so bossy, but I thought it was just great. As he got a little older he became a really great swimmer, a fish, and in the pool it was a very even match. Why one of us didn’t drown is a miracle to me. Under water, where no one else could hear us or bother much with our game … we worked out all the brother-sister hostilities. He won more often than he lost. And in addition, we had vowed silence. No tattle-tales, even if you got hurt. That was our bargain and we kept it.
Stepfather Phillip was a kind man but he and mother didn’t get along very well all the time. He got the unpleasant job of spanking me. We worked out a deal. We would go down to the building across from the pool where they showed movies and sometimes had parties and that’s where I got my spankings from him … in the theater.
The deal was that I would get one additional spank each time I had to be punished. At first it was okay because I only got one spank and it was all over. Compared with mother’s spankings it was a real bargain.
/> She used the hairbrush or her hand. She’d succeeded in breaking three hairbrushes across my bottom after she said she’d worn out her hand. I was only about five.
It was actually a nice time with Phillip in the theater at the beginning of our deal. We would talk and he’d ask me what I thought I was being punished for and I’d tell him and he’d give me his ideas on the subject and I’d vow never to do it again. Then he’d pick me up and carry me back to the house. It was nice and I liked the feeling of being close to him. He had a kind face.
Then one day I got the shock of my life. He gave me a spanking that really hurt. I mean really hurt. His hands were bigger than mother’s and, of course, he had a lot more strength. I cried. But not all of the crying was for the pain of spanking … about half of it was for the betrayal. After that, all the spankings hurt … more and more. It had turned out to be a rotten deal. Now he didn’t pick me up and carry me back to the big house. He just held my hand firmly as I walked beside him sniffling. We didn’t even look at one another.
1 My biological mother was a 19-year-old student but my father was an engineer, as I was to discover. I was told my mother died giving birth to me, but the truth is she died at 57 without bearing other children.
2 It was not until 1980 while I was having lunch with film producer Frank Yablans at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge that the true reason for this mysterious journey emerged.
Frank told me that in doing some of his own research for the film, he found out that mother had underworld connections going back as far as her dancehall/nightclub performer days as a teenager in Detroit and Chicago. Through those connections she met Meyer Lansky, reputed head of the Jewish Mafia. In the 1940’s he lived in Miami, Florida. It was Lansky who had arranged for my legal adoption in Las Vegas, Nevada through mob connections there, since my birth state, California, had laws which did not permit single women to adopt children.
Mommie Dearest Page 3