Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  At the end of the school year, I went home. It was nice to see my brother and sisters again, but it didn’t take me long to discover that we had a horrible nurse. Mrs. Howe had decided not to work full time for one family and was just working relief days. The woman we had was a young Swedish task master who had her own ideas about how to treat us. It wasn’t that she was stricter than Mrs. Howe had been but that she was meaner. Her spankings were often with a hanger or a belt strap and not always confined to our bottoms. She had a miserable habit of twisting your ear to get you to do something and we all hated her.

  One night mother was going out on a date and left instructions that I could watch television until Spade Cooley was over. My brother and I loved to watch that show because of the old guy that did the car commercials. In those days the commercials were live and this guy called “Leatherbritches” would come on and bang his hand down on the hood of the car while he was telling you what a great deal it was and the whole car would rattle and shake. He slammed doors and pounded away while my brother and I would roll on the floor with laughter. That was our favorite part of the whole variety show.

  This particular night the Swedish nurse came in while Chris and I were in our usual state of hysteria over “Leatherbritches”’ antics and without saying a word she turned off the TV.

  “Mother said we could watch to the end of Spade Cooley”, I told her.

  “This show is nothing but silly trash”, she replied with a note of disgust in her voice.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think. Mother said we could watch it!” I snapped back. With rather amazing speed she slapped me across the face. I hated being slapped in the face. I absolutely hated it. It wasn’t the hurt so much as the insult. I raised my hand to hit her back and she grabbed me by the hair. She was considerably stronger than I was and she managed to pull me by the hair all the way upstairs and into my room.

  Once inside the room she released me by throwing me down on the bed. It looked to me as though she was coming after me again. I pulled my knees up to my chest and just as she was leaning over to hit me I kicked her in the stomach with both my feet as hard as I could. To my astonishment she went flying across the room and landed in a heap under the window. I had effectively knocked the wind out of her but she was not unconscious. I sat on the bed staring at her and wondering what would happen next. After a minute or so she muttered something to me in what I supposed was Swedish and sort of staggered out of the room holding onto her stomach.

  The next morning I didn’t say one word to the nurse and when mother asked me what had happened I told her exactly. She asked me where I had gotten the idea to kick the nurse in the stomach. With a look of total innocence I replied, “That’s the way they do it in cowboy movies!”

  The nurse was fired on the spot and I didn’t get to watch cowboy movies for a week. In retrospect, I thought it was a fair price to pay if it got rid of the nurse whom we all hated.

  However, we were generally having a lot of trouble keeping any servants. Cooks, nurses, secretaries and the rest came and went with astonishing regularity. Many of the nurses couldn’t stomach what one referred to as the “reform school discipline”. If they were ever caught trying to bend the rules even a little bit they were fired. After a while it was hard to keep their names straight as one blended into another. At one point, we hadn’t been able to keep anyone longer than a couple of months. Just as we got used to them, they packed up and left, and we never saw them again. It seemed to us that the nicer they were, the faster they left. We also had a couple of old battle axes, but mercifully they were fired too.

  We had one terrific nurse at this time named Ishy. I think she was English, but I’m not really sure. She was neither young nor old and she knew wonderful games which she taught all of us. She was strict enough to satisfy mother and kind enough to be tolerable to us. Unfortunately there was another situation in the house at the time that proved to be too much for Ishy.

  It was during this time that mother did one of her last pictures for Warner Brothers. It was not very good and she knew it. She also probably knew that her days under contract were about over.

  Since she didn’t share most of her problems with anyone in the house, we were only aware that she seemed angry and edgy much of the time. Mother had a “wounded animal” attitude toward adversity in that she tended to go off by herself and suffer alone rather than let anyone share or discuss the trouble with her. That attitude may have spared her ego to some extent but it kept things bottled up and left little room for negotiation in her relationships. She thought other people should behave in the same stalwart, solitary manner and saw it as a mark of weakness if they didn’t. What it really did was confine her behind a mask of strength and kept people, including her children, at a distance. It contributed to a great measure of her loneliness and her feelings of having to fight every inch of the way alone. She really had a terrible time trusting anyone and letting anyone see that she was human with the failings and frailties that implies. She had set her course. Any deviation or relaxation from that proscribed routine was interpreted as failure, lack of will power. She put great store in personal will power and attributed most of her own success to it. That will power guided her through the rough waters of each day. It was translated into rules governing all facets of household management, the children’s discipline and her own career. Nothing was left to chance or experiment or negotiation.

  She set the rules without consultation and enforced them without deviation. By virtue of having been created, the rules carried with them the weight of moral rightness. They absolutely were right and everything, everyone else was simply wrong. Her way was the way and she would not listen to contrary opinion. It was as though she believed that enough rules, rigidly enforced, would keep the world in order. It was a way of trying to hold back chaos and with it any spontaneous, chance infringement on her territory.

  CHAPTER 14

  I suppose there is no creature more perverse than the human being. If there is chaos in a life, no amount of regulation and will power will hold it in total abeyance forever. The inner turbulence will seek an outlet and find the weakest link in the armor of the personality.

  For mother the weak link was alcohol.

  One summer night I had been watching television until my usual bedtime. When I went upstairs I noticed that one of the sliding doors to mother’s suite of rooms was open. I knew she was home but I didn’t hear any sounds of movement or talking on the phone. I went into my room and got ready for bed. By then it was maybe nine thirty and I knocked on mother’s door intending to say goodnight. There was no answer to either my knocking or calling which I thought was strange. I went downstairs to check and see if she was anywhere else in the house but she wasn’t.

  When I went back to her doorway I thought I heard a small noise like a moan but I wasn’t sure. I walked into the upstairs sitting room and through the main door into her dressing room. There were a few lights on but I didn’t see her. I made a circular tour of the dressing room and bath area and started down the narrow hallway on the opposite side of the room and when I went through the first door I nearly stumbled over her body lying on the floor! Seeing her lying there startled and shocked me at the same time. I kneeled beside her and tried to rouse her, thinking maybe she’d fainted. I couldn’t seem to get any response, though it was apparent that she was still breathing and alive. Since I was unable to move her by myself, I rushed to get help and the first person I found was the nurse, Ishy. Sort of half talking and half babbling my story, I pulled Ishy back to where mother was lying unconscious. I was scared that she was sick. I had to fight to remain even relatively calm. Ishy leaned over and turned mother face up.

  “Should I call the doctor?” I whispered to Ishy. She only shook her head negatively. “What’s wrong with her?” I whispered again.

  Ishy looked me straight in the eyes and said, “She’s drunk.”

  “Drunk? Are you sure?” I asked her.

  She just nodde
d her head again. “It’s not the first time,” and indicated that I should help her carry mother to her bed. I was surprised how difficult it was for the two of us to maneuver the limp body safely across one room and into her bed. Once there, Ishy covered her and I arranged the pillows under her head.

  We turned out the lights and closed the sliding door behind us. I said goodnight to Ishy and she went back to her room on the other side of the house.

  I lay in bed thinking about what had happened, trying to piece it all together. I was still shocked but it didn’t seem to surprise Ishy. I thought about how sometimes mother seemed to be different but I never knew why. Then I realized that it was usually in the evening after she’d started drinking around five or six o’clock. Then I thought about the aspirin in the morning and knew enough to begin putting that together with what was called a hangover. I realized that the aspirin in the morning had been going on for several years but I had never known why. That was probably why she was so grumpy in the morning even if she’d slept until nearly noon and we’d had to whisper all morning. I’d heard other kids talk about their parents drinking and I knew that some of them had parents who had a real problem with booze. I tried to think back over some of those conversations and sort this out for myself, since I was quite sure there wouldn’t be anyone I could trust to talk about it.

  Needless to say, nothing was ever mentioned about the incident. I don’t know if mother ever even wondered about how she got to bed, but I never said a word about it.

  Before I left for camp that summer there were several more times that Ishy and I carried mother to bed. It didn’t scare me now, I just listened for the significant noises and then went to get the nurse. There was sort of a dream like qualify about the whole thing, since in the light of day, no one mentioned either the event or the problem, as though it never happened. But at summer’s end when I came home from camp, Ishy had quit.

  The rest of the help, particularly the cooks, we were now getting from the employment agencies, were next to useless. They were downright incompetent. One woman was so nervous she actually burned a pot of green beans so badly that the entire mess including the pot had to be thrown out. She only lasted one day.

  But the replacements were no better. They turned out frizzled, rubbery fried eggs, burnt toast, soggy vegetables and watery sauces. They couldn’t be trusted to do the shopping properly, broke things and generally lived in a state of chronic nervous collapse. They were incompetent but mother screaming at them certainly didn’t improve matters. She had a way of giving people a string of orders all at once and expecting them not only to remember all the instructions but also to do them in the order she’d given them. For all of these people, that was an impossible feat. They couldn’t even seem to do the job they were hired for, let alone anything creative.

  Mother was in a constant state of rage that never let up between the firing of one unfortunate and the hiring of the next. The atmosphere of extreme agitation permeated the entire household. After a while, the most qualified person in the world could have come into that kitchen and never had a chance to succeed. The only good thing from my point of view was that I didn’t have to eat any more rare meat. By some minor miracle, these cooks couldn’t seem to get it that rare.

  I am not surprised that word of mother’s rampages got back to the employment agencies. The turnover at our house became common knowledge and the agencies simply wouldn’t send us any more applicants because there was no one left to send.

  But fortunately I spent six weeks at Douglas Camp in the Carmel River Valley. Unfortunately, most of the six weeks was spent in the infirmary with a miserable combination of boils and acute poison oak. I was the original calamine kid that summer.

  When I returned from camp looking much improved but still dreadful, mother said that Mrs. Chadwick wanted to speak to me. There was some question about whether or not I would return to school. My heart was in my throat as I dialed the phone. In the last year and a half I’d grown to really like the school and was sure I’d made some friends. Because of the haste with which I’d been transferred out of public school, I’d lost touch with most of my friends there and really didn’t know many kids in my own neighborhood either. I had sort of assumed that I would be going back in the fall and now I didn’t know what to expect.

  Mrs. Chadwick told me she realized that I still had a struggle on my hands in terms of full acceptance at the school and she wanted to give me the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to stay or if I thought it would be easier for me to start over fresh somewhere else. I hadn’t anticipated that I’d have anything to do with this kind of decision about my own life and I had to think for a moment. The considerable difficulties of the previous school year paraded across my memory. I thought about what little progress I’d been able to make and knew that she was right about still having to struggle. But I also thought about Hoagy and Jane and some of the others. If I left now it would be an admission of defeat. If I left, I wouldn’t even be around to defend myself. I told her I’d like to stay at Chadwick School. She accepted my decision and said she was glad to see I had the courage to see it through.

  What I had no way of knowing at that time was that eighth grade was going to be the worse year yet.

  Even at home I had been living under a permanent “second chance” status ever since that fateful Friday night many months before. There was no leeway for minor infractions of the rules under “second chance”. I had the feeling that whatever I did was suspect and it began to make me very nervous. I was never quite sure whether this would be the day when I did something that would wipe out even the tenuous second chance status of my existance and I’d find myself in serious trouble again! I lived those days certain that I was standing on the brink of an unseen disaster.

  There were only four eighth grade girls who were boarding students that year and it was decided that instead of living at the dorm, we would all live at Chadwick House. Besides myself there was Nancy, Marianna and Racquel who was from El Salvador. Nancy and I had our own rooms while Marianna and Racquel shared the larger room at the end of the hallway. Chadwick House was a large three-story hillside Spanish house with magnificent gardens and a spectacular view of the ocean. Commander and Mrs. Chadwick were used to having children living with them and taking us into their home was not the disruption for them that it might at first seem. In return, we helped with the cleaning and the dishes. We went to school with them in the morning and stayed there through dinner and until study hall was over in the evening. On the weekends we helped to clean the house and then were free to do as we wished.

  There was nothing initially to indicate that this was going to be such a difficult year for me except perhaps the second chance business at home.

  So many of the students lived in the West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills area that a private bus service was arranged to take us to and from school twice a month. At first I went home every other weekend just like everyone else. But these weekends were not going very well and I knew it. Because we were chronically short of help there seemed to be an unending list of things I was supposed to do when I got home. Many times I spent most of Saturday doing the laundry and hanging it out on the lines and then folding it and taking the different piles to their proper destination. There was always my room to be cleaned from top to bottom even though it had hardly been used. If mother was having company, there was silver to be polished and extra housework. The only thing I really enjoyed doing was setting the table with the beautiful silverware and crystal and china. It looked so lovely afterwards that I often wished I had a picture of it. In the evening when the guests came I would tend bar and sometimes help serve dinner.

  I would be fine on Friday when I first got home. By Saturday I would be tired and on Sunday I’d be nervous all over again. It was not unusual for me to loose weight during those weekends because mother was after me all the time. Either I hadn’t done something properly or I moved too slowly. She literally kept us running from the time we g
ot up until long after dinner. Chris was about eight now and beginning to feel the brunt of the work too. More than once she kept him up until after midnight scrubbing the floor of the dining room in which we ate. She made him do that floor over time after time as she found one flaw or another first in his work and then in his attitude.

  The worst part of it was that I couldn’t do anything to help him. If I opened my mouth, both of us got in trouble. Mother’s strategy was one of divide-and-conquer. One of us kids had to be in trouble all the time. Now it was Chris’s turn to be the family scapegoat. I was at school most of the time and the girls were still too young. Mother also whipped Chris at the slightest provocation. In just a few brief years Chris had gone from being the fair-haired son to taking the brunt of mother’s wrath impatience.

  He was just at the stage when he wanted to ride bikes and play ball and go swimming all day and here he was held captive in a house full of nothing but women. There was no father to play with, no man to understand from his own childhood what a young boy goes through growing up. I got the impression that mother never really tried to understand either.

  Despite the insistence and urging of several of her male friends, she refused to hear any compromise. She never changed any of the rules to accommodate a boy and Chris was forced into playing catch with the nurse and riding his bike around the pool. When he had a friend over they had to be careful about the flower beds and making too much noise. But rarely was he allowed to go to other boys’ homes and almost never to ride his bike on the wide empty streets around our house. Most of the whippings and the trouble he got into would have seemed cruel indeed in any other circumstance.