Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  It must have been several hours later when I heard a knock on the door and someone’s voice telling me to get dressed and come downstairs to the bar. I had no idea what was going on but I followed the orders.

  Still half asleep I descended the back stairs into the large living room we called the bar.

  Not all the lights were on in the room so it was not very bright and outside it was pitch dark. Seated on the couch were my mother and a man I’d never seen before.

  When I entered the room the man stood up and mother introduced him to me, adding that he was a juvenile officer. I had no idea what a juvenile officer was doing in the house but while I was trying to figure out this new turn of events, the man asked my mother to leave the room so that he could speak to me alone. That surprised me because no one had ever said anything similar to her in my presence. Evidently she’d already spoken with him at some length, so she did not seem taken aback by his request.

  I was still standing in the doorway but, after she left, the man asked me to come and sit on the couch with him. When I was seated he looked at me carefully for quite a long time without saying anything.

  “She beat you pretty badly, didn’t she?” he said rather softly.

  I looked down at the floor and nodded my head yes. I didn’t know what she’d told him. I also had no way of knowing what I looked like since the room I’d been locked up in didn’t have a mirror.

  “Your mother’s told me her version of the story … now I’d like to hear yours.”

  I looked at him carefully. He was a man of about 40, not particularly handsome but nice looking in a plain way. His eyes were straight forward and direct. He seemed concerned but not particularly sympathetic and he looked tired.

  I told him the events as simply and honestly as I could. I told him about going to dinner and the drive home when mother had told her friend that I’d been expelled from school, which wasn’t true. I told him about her hitting me and then telling me to come into the bar, pointing to the service area as I talked. I then told him about saying that part about how I thought she ought to be the more understanding one since she was older, the parent and the adult. I looked him directly in the face and said, “That’s when she tried to kill me.” I told him also that if it hadn’t been for Billie’s help, she might have succeeded.

  That was the end of my story and I sat in silence with him for at least a minute.

  When finally he started to speak, it was slow and deliberate. I knew he was choosing his words very carefully. He said that there was nothing he could do to help me. He said that I’d have to try harder to get along with my mother because if she called the authorities again, he’d have no choice but to take me to juvenile hall as an incorrigible.

  He talked to me longer and tried to explain the situation more fully to me, but I could hardly hear anything more he said. What kept racing around in my mind was being taken off to juvenile hall as an incorrigible! What kind of a world was it that allowed my mother to nearly murder me and then make me take the rap as an incorrigible? What kind of world was it that let her off scot-free and punished me for her insanity? It was totally crazy. It was a crazy world. What power did she have that everyone believed her or at least acted like they did? Was it true that even the juvenile authorities believed her and would really take me to juvenile and put me in some detention school for incorrigibles?

  “I’m not going to take you to juvenile hall tonight, even though that’s what your mother has requested.”

  I had no words. I stared at him totally speechless. I couldn’t believe this nightmare was happening to me.

  “I’m going to tell her that we’ve had a long talk and that you’re going to try harder to get along with her and not cause any more trouble in this household. But I have to tell you honestly that if she calls us again, I’ll have to take you down to juvenile hall.”

  I didn’t say a word but tears streamed down my face. I couldn’t get it through my head that the world of adults and justice would take me to juvenile hall like some delinquent or criminal when it was mother that had committed the wrong. My brain understood the words he was saying but I couldn’t stand the cruelty and the injustice of it all. It was clear that I was all alone. There was no one in the world to help me. There was no one in the world to take a stand against her. The cards were all stacked in her favor. I just had to live with whatever chaos she chose to visit upon me whenever she got drunk or crazy.

  Looking at him I knew he was trying to be gentle with me but it didn’t help. I hated him and all the others for being too weak to stand up to her. And I hated her for what she did to people, for the way she bullied them with her stardom and her money. I hated the institutions that allowed this woman to live outside the rules of common decency and the law. It seemed to me there was a conspiracy of the famous who thought they were above the rules of the rest of society. By virtue of their fame, they were above the common people and didn’t have to abide by the common people’s ethics or values. Their money and their public image entitled them to make their own rules and then force everyone else to play the game their way. I felt myself bringing the cloak of my own body around my inner self for some small measure of protection. I decided from now on I would not show anyone how I felt. I would not ask anyone for anything. If I was to be totally alone, so be it … but I would not give any of them the satisfaction of knowing how much it hurt. I would simply learn not to care.

  “I wish there was something more I could do to help you, but there isn’t. You don’t want to go to juvenile hall, do you?” He waited until I shook my head no, then he said, “Then remember what I told you and try to get along here and at school.”

  He called mother back into the room. I left to go back to bed after they’d both had their say. I never looked at either of them again, even when I had to shake hands with the juvenile officer as a goodbye.

  The next morning I got up and got dressed after trying the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t, so I went downstairs and through the house to my own room. When I got into the bathroom to wash up, I had quite a shock. It was the first time I’d seem myself in the mirror and I understood why it took the juvenile officer so long to start talking to me. Even in the dimly lighted room he must have been able to see my battered face.

  I had one black eye and a cut on my upper lip that was swollen and covered with dried blood. My whole face was sort of puffy and I had a perfect handprint bruised across one cheek. My eyes were also swollen from crying during the night and I looked a mess. As I stared at the battered and bruised image of my face in the mirror I started crying again. My god … I looked awful. How could I be declared the incorrigible one?

  I couldn’t allow myself to think about it now. I turned on the cold water and plunged both my hands into the icy wetness, splashing it generously over my face. I had a sick and shaky feeling all over. I realized that just washing my face wasn’t going to help much, so I decided to take a shower.

  I turned the shower on hot and stood under it trying to rid myself of this clammy, chilly, shaky feeling. I washed my hair and gingerly felt the lump on the back of my head. Finally I turned the water colder and colder until there was no hot water left at all. It stung but it got rid of the sick feeling inside me.

  I dried my hair and got dressed. The sick feeling came and went in waves, but I drank some cold water and that seemed to help. Later I took some aspirin for my headache.

  Everyone in the house looked at me sadly when I went down to breakfast, but no one directly referred to my black eye or asked me what happened to me. I could see that just having to look at me was scary for them and they tried to act as though everything was normal. The nurse told me mother had left word for me to stay in my room except for meals. I thought maybe someone would take me to a doctor, but no one did.

  A few days later I was on my way back to the Chadwick’s house. Mother had told them that I was incorrigible and she couldn’t handle me any longer. They asked to have a chance to straighten thin
gs out, so back I went.

  I still had vestiges of the black eye but the rest of my face had returned pretty much to normal. I was actually glad to be back with them even if I was a virtual prisoner in their home. I wasn’t allowed any personal phone calls or mail or visitors. Since I was still being punished, I had to do extra work at the house and wasn’t allowed to go anywhere except to church on Sunday with Mrs. Chadwick.

  One of the many jobs I had to do was clean out all the outside closets and storage areas. I used to have nightmares about the bugs and the dead creepy crawlies in those closets. Sometimes even in the heat of the summer I’d be covered with goosebumps while I was doing the work. But no one bothered me and even though it was very lonely sometimes, it was better than being at home.

  During those days alone while I worked I tried to sort out the mysteries of my life. There seemed to be times of total chaos followed by punishment and days of being all by myself. As the thing that originally caused the trouble faded away with time what was left for me was a state of “second chance.” That meant that I had to watch every move I made, every word I said. It meant that everyone watched me more carefully than usual to make sure I did my work without a slip and toed the mark day after day. Human nature and time itself eased the situation somewhat, but there was always that tension, that silent expectation of the “next time”. After a while it all melted into a life style of troubled times, of never feeling totally at ease, of always being on the alert for the first signs of renewed outbursts from mother over some infinitesimal slight, some unpremeditated oversight, some minute infringement of the rules that constantly changed according to whim and alcohol content in her blood.

  I began to be rather adept at skirting the fringes of her recurrent insanity and at walking the tightrope of my own loneliness. Even though I did not feel I was a bad person, even though I didn’t believe I had committed any serious crimes against humanity, I began to understand how parolees must feel being constantly watched and monitored with everyone waiting for the first telltale signs of a slip, living under the threat of incarceration.

  The juvenile officer instilled in me a terror of being locked up in juvenile hall. I didn’t really know all of what that meant in reality, but the threat of it was enough to terrify me and make me feel cold all over. I retreated as far into myself as I could go without completely loosing touch with everyday reality. I lived in daydreams of the moment when I would be free to go my own way and live my own life. I made up stories about where I would go and what I would do when I grew up. I could amuse myself for days with these daydreams that were ongoing dramas I wove around the little I knew about the world outside.

  Since I was not allowed to go to the movies or to watch television, I read books for entertainment. I would read far into the night until I was tired enough to go to sleep and hope the nightmares would not recur tonight. Maybe if I were tired enough I’d sleep soundly. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I’d wake up in a cold sweat thinking something was trying to get me. After several nights like that, I’d sleep with the lights on and hope that would work.

  Toward the end of that summer, the Chadwicks took me camping with them for a month up in the high Sierras.

  I lived at Chadwick house during my tenth grade year with my brother and a girl named Sandy. The circumstances had changed since my last stay a year before. Mother had spoken with the Chadwicks about her financial condition, which she indicated was in sad shape. She was only doing one film a year now and told the Chadwicks that although she fully planned to pay the tuition for Chris and myself, it might be a little slow in coming. Therefore I was put on partial scholarship and had to do extra work in order to get the money to pay for the things Chris and I needed such as school supplies, toothpaste and the various other little necessities of our lives. We were both expected to work at the Chadwicks’ house and I worked at school also. What that meant was that I made breakfast for everyone in the morning and then Sandy and I made all the beds while Chris helped Mrs. Chadwick with the dishes. We all went to school together staying until after dinner and study hall. During the late afternoon I would also help in one of the offices or wherever extra work was required. On Saturdays we worked all day doing the laundry, cleaning the house, the yard and the patios. Since Mrs. Chadwick was a stem housekeeper from the old school and there were five of us living in the house, there was always a lot to be done. Sandy and I even had to wash the blue third floor carpeting on our hands and knees with a smelly solution of soap, ammonia and bluing. On Sunday mornings we finished up the ironing that hadn’t been completed the day before and were usually allowed to have Sunday afternoons to ourselves once the work was done.

  Saturday lunch was always the same. Mrs. Chadwick would start soup stock in a big kettle on Friday night. Saturday morning while we were doing the laundry, she would clean out the icebox and everything that hadn’t already spoiled went into the kettle. Around noon we all gathered in the kitchen and Mrs. Chadwick ladled generous portions into large bowls. Chris, Sandy and I sat in a small room adjacent to the kitchen and ate at our own table. Chris gave our Saturday lunch its name, which stuck with it for the duration of our stay. He called it “gristle soup” and it was often only too appropriate! Fortunately, Commander’s German Shepherd named Bart was allowed to lie on the floor of our little room and we figured out ingenious, lightning fast ways to sneak large portions of the more inedible parts of the “gristle soup” into the eager jaws of the dog. If it hadn’t been for the presence of Bart, our lives would have been difficult indeed. Mrs. Chadwick insisted that we finish all our food and there was no avenue of escape other than the dog. Many times we were silently convulsed with laughter at the expertise with which Chris rid his bowl of the gristle and fat.

  The Chadwicks paid me $30 a month for my work. With that I bought Chris whatever things he had to have, including socks and sneakers. Since we were on such a strict budget, my provisions weren’t exactly the lap of luxury but we both managed to get by without feeling totally deprived. We never received a penny from mother nor did she pay our entire tuition that year.

  I went to visit her on the MGM lot several times while she was filming Torch Song. The school bus would drop me off at the studio and I’d stay with her on the set until she drove home. It was interesting to watch the dance scenes that she’d been rehearsing with the director Chuck Walters since late summer. She did most of her own singing too, although it was later over-dubbed. It was the first time she’d been back at work on the Metro lot in about 12 years and she received a royal welcome from all the people who were still there from the old days. It was a time filled with nostalgia for her but it was nostalgia mixed with anxiety and very hard work. She was 45 years old by public reckoning but, if grandmother’s version of her age was correct, she was in reality nearly 50. She had been working on the choreography with Chuck Walters for months before the picture started shooting and had also started singing lessons again. She was determined to have the dance sequences look convincing and she worked long hard hours to ensure professionalism. The picture was only mediocre but she got a lot of publicity out of her return to Metro and the dance numbers.

  Evidently she had slipped further into debt than she’d told Mrs. Chadwick because even after the picture finished shooting, she was unable to pay the rest of our tuition or give either Chris or me any allowance. She said it was good for us to have to work for what we got. She’d had to work her way through school scrubbing floors and waiting on tables, she said, and it wouldn’t hurt me a bit to have to do the same. She thought that thirty dollars a month was more than adequate for what little we needed. After all, she said, how much could some school paper and pencils cost? When I tried to explain to her that there were other things we needed like toothpaste and gym clothes, she simply said that it was about time I learned to budget my money better. She didn’t want to hear any more about it because she was having a hard time herself. She told me that she was going to have to take out a second mortgage
on her house if she didn’t get another picture soon and that she had money problems beyond what she was going to tell me about. The picture she painted was one of debtor’s prison just waiting for one false move on her part.

  I never could figure out where all the money went. We certainly didn’t get the benefit of any of it. Even with two of us at boarding school, it just wasn’t that expensive. We didn’t eat at home and certainly she didn’t buy us lavish gifts or shower us with extensive wardrobes. She sent us no allowance money and she wasn’t paying the school tuition which was under $2,000 a year for each of us … so where was all the money going? I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t being spent on us even though she made us feel as though we were an interminable drain on her meager resources.

  That might have been possible to believe if we had been in different circumstances. But at Chadwick the average student was from a prominent family either in the film industry or the general business community so we had first hand knowledge of what standards our peer group held to be the norm. Their expectations far exceeded ours and the two of us were sort of pitied as poor relations. Indeed, Chris often looked like a ragamuffin but part of it was because he was just at that age when he was very hard on clothes and growing faster than I could afford to get new jeans for him. He went through sneakers in a matter of a couple months and they always seemed to have holes in them. Because he was not adverse to getting in fights or playing ball in the dirt, his jeans were unusually prone to rips and worn spots. I managed a bit better because I could borrow clothes from Sandy and once in a while someone would give me sweaters or blouses they didn’t want anymore. At first I was embarrassed about taking the hand-me-downs, but they were better than nothing, so I accepted.