Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  Toward the middle of January 1957, mother and Daddy returned from England. I was very disappointed in the Christmas gifts she’d sent. They were cocktail dresses, which I certainly did not need. What I needed was a winter coat, boots, winter pants and skirts. Although I’d told her all this over the phone, I received cocktail dresses instead.

  Christina darling,

  I am having your Christmas gifts mailed to you in Pittsburgh. Would you please write thank-you letters for all of them, and send them to me? Leave the envelopes unsealed, dear. I will address and mail the letters for you.

  Please send the thank-you letters to 426 North Bristol Avenue, dear. Aunt Betty will forward them to me.

  Love,

  Mommie

  P.S. We just arrived on the Queen Mary two hours ago and found your Christmas gifts your daddy adored his Moustache cologne and soap - and I love my stoles and sweet fur topped booties - more later darling -

  All my love

  Mommie

  (The “P.S.” was handwritten at the bottom of the typed letter.)

  Somehow I always hoped that daddy would write me himself, but he never did. I never heard from him except through mother’s letters, I never talked to him on the phone when I called them. We were translated to one another only through mother.

  I laughed about the absurdity of still having to send unsealed thank-you notes home just like a little kid. After all, I was in college and I was seventeen and a half years old. To all intents and purposes, I was on my own. There wasn’t any secretary or nurse following me around checking up on my every move. I may not have become exactly adult yet, but I certainly wasn’t some infant that had to send notes home for approval.

  The letter didn’t make me feel as badly as similar letters from mother made me feel in the past, but I wondered seriously about who it was that she thought she was writing to, who it was that she had in mind when she was dictating. I wondered if she even thought much about me at all except when she had to answer one of my letters to her. I hadn’t seen her in over a year. She had never been to Flintridge or Carnegie. She didn’t know exactly what I looked like anymore and she couldn’t really know much of anything about how I felt or what kind of person I was.

  I’d been through a lot of changes during the first five months of college, but I think that happens to most people. It’s your first real taste of growing up and being responsible for your own life. You meet so many new people. People whose ideas may be very different from your own. You are exposed to so much new information, so many new situations.

  Most of my classmates had difficult Christmas vacations at home for just these reasons. Suddenly, they were not the same people their families remembered and it was unsettling for everyone. But mother hadn’t seen me since I left New York after finishing the magazine layout in January of 1956. I could tell she really didn’t know me by the presents she sent. They were nice, but they weren’t appropriate for this time and this place in my life. She didn’t even choose them. She put in orders and the store sent the closest thing they had in stock. The clothes weren’t the right size and they weren’t the right style, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, because the price tags had been removed and I had no way to return them. So, I wrote the thank-you notes and put the things in the back of my closet, untouched until it was time to pack them in the trunk.

  Spring vacation was at hand shortly after Christmas. Again my friend invited me to her home in Brooklyn. Again I asked mother if I could please come to New York. This time I knew mother and daddy would be there and I wanted to see them.

  We talked several times on the phone and finally it was agreed that I could go home with Mickey and come into the city to visit mother and daddy.

  I was very excited about going to New York again, with the prospect of seeing more plays and getting to know the city better. Mickey and I got reservations on the same flight, which landed at the old La Guardia airport.

  Her home in Brooklyn was-on a quiet dead-end street lined with trees. Mr. and Mrs. Coburn were totally loving and parental people whom I called Aunt Min and Uncle Ben after the first few hours. They had one son at Cornell, Mickey at Carnegie and a younger son yet to be Bar Mitzvahed. They made me feel like part of the family immediately. Aunt Min was always putting food out on the table. Uncle Ben told funny jokes and tried to maintain some order in the boisterous household. Their little three-story house was always filled with people … friends, relatives and kids from the neighborhood. It struck me then that their hospitality was in sharp contrast to my own family. Here they were with two kids in college, another son preparing for Bar Mitzvah, Uncle Ben the only wage earner (an accountant) and still they had room in their home for one more. Five miles away in New York City, Mother and Daddy had an eight room apartment on Sutton Place South and they didn’t have enough room for their daughter to spend a week’s vacation from college. They didn’t have an extra bed or a spare couch where I could sleep and they hadn’t seen me in a year. Yet these strangers, this Jewish family in Brooklyn with their little house bursting at the seams, they had plenty of room for one more kid.

  My parents had no place for me to stay with them, but they put on a big show for the Coburn family. I’d gone into the city a couple of times to have lunch with mother and Daddy at “21” Club, taking a taxi both ways because I was terrified of the subway system. Several times, mother had gotten tickets for Broadway shows, which someone took me to see. Then, before vacation was over, she invited the entire Coburn family to have lunch. We all got dressed up and took a cab to the Sutton Place apartment where we met mother and Daddy. They were very gracious to the Coburns who were understandably impressed. Then we went to lunch at “21”, mother and Daddy’s regular hang-out. Daddy talked to Uncle Ben and Aunt Min and my mother talked mostly to my friend Mickey about her aspirations to becoming a writer. I could see the charm all around me, but there was no way for me to warn Mickey not to believe everything mother said about wanting to read her work. I’d been in this situation as many times before that I knew it was graciousness, not instantaneous friendship … but how do you tell someone else who wants to believe in the reality of it that it’s just ordinary operating procedure? How do you tell them that it’s nothing special. You don’t. You just have to let them find out for themselves.

  Mother had given me $200.00 when I first met them for lunch by myself. That money was for taxis, for taking the Coburn family to dinner at Sardi’s and for a house gift before leaving for school. I spent most of it on just those things. Taxis were nearly $10 each way and dinner at Sardi’s was about $70.00. Compared to the allowance I was supposed to be getting, it was a lot of money. Compared to what things cost and commuting into the city from Brooklyn every other day, it barely lasted until the end of the ten-day vacation.

  After the first visit, neither mother nor daddy asked me very much about myself. When I saw them it was usually in a restaurant and they were usually talking business with their friends or saying hello to the other people in the restaurant who dropped by the table. It was all very chic and all very expensively pleasant but it was also very impersonal. Coming from my college atmosphere where everyone was involved in the process of “discovering” who they really were it seemed very superficial to me. I also thought that it cost an absurd amount of money. Lunch alone usually cost nearly $100 and I thought wistfully about struggling to get along on my monthly allowance. Just one of those lunches would have made my life so much easier when I was at school. Just one of those lunches would have bought me a winter coat and boots. But it was useless to think in those terms. I learned long ago that when it came to money there were two distinctly different standards … one for mother’s needs and one for mine. Whatever mother wanted, mother got. Whatever I wanted, I had to beg for and usually didn’t get. She’d give me $200 for a showy ten-day vacation designed to impress a family in Brooklyn, but no money for allowance when I was away at school. It was definitely a case of “out of sight, out of mind.”

&n
bsp; February 14, 1957

  Christina darling,

  Thank you for your sweet Valentine - it is just darling, and for the “Thank-you” notes.

  I received your report card and am very proud of you.

  Darling, please is it possible to let me know if the (family I stayed with over Christmas) received their carafes. I know how busy you are, darling, but just drop me a note, or call.

  Incidentally, if you ever hear from the Blakes again it is not Glo, it is Florence and Joyce Blake.

  All my love, darling, and I hope you are happy.

  Your,

  “Mommie”

  P.S. Darling just received your letter today and honey I just cannot give you more money this month - you figure out how much I gave you while you were on your vacation down here and the dress the shoes - The gifts for the Coburns I bought too - so you will just have to wait for you March allowance

  Love - Mommie

  I kind of knew that I wouldn’t get any more money, but I had to ask anyway. As for the report card, it was the worst I’d ever gotten, but I was saved by the belief that college was more difficult the first semester. Actually, I ended up with a straight B average, which meant a couple of A’s and a couple of C’s balanced each other out.

  Since I had no money at all by this time, I started typing term papers at 25¢ a page. Each floor of the dorm had a living room and I’d stay up half the night typing while the other girls studied and then went to bed, leaving me working alone. I hated the term papers and I wasn’t the best typist in the world, so it seemed to take me forever to finish. But I did them faster than most of the other girls who did typing so I had a steady clientele before long.

  February 25, 1957

  Tina darling,

  Thank you for your letter and I am glad your Director is so good. I am also glad you are working so hard, and delighted about the part in Cymbeline. This experience will stand you in good stead when you get out into the world and really have to work. You know, Tina, most people think that college is the toughest part of it. It isn’t nearly as tough as when you get out and have to do your own job by yourself. This probably won’t make any sense to you now, but in a few years it will.

  Did you ever get the other dress from Bramson’s in Chicago? Please let me know.

  Hope everything went alright with the dentist.

  All my love,

  Your,

  “Mommie”

  I thought a lot about getting out on my own during those hours typing late at night in the quiet dorm. I was getting bored with being in school for so many years. It’s not that I didn’t like Carnegie, because it was great for me. I was beginning to improve in my acting classes and starting to gee a good reputation for the scenes I did. I had no trouble getting a partner to work with and we worked hard. I was learning to take the inevitable criticism without feeling that I’d totally failed. I was starting to understand some of the fundamentals of working on stage with others and taking directions more easily. Some of the other classes were boring to me, but not acting. It was just that I was so tired of being in schools all my life. I was tired of never having any money, any proper clothing, any normal freedom.

  Since I’d never had a real paying job, I had no idea what it would be like, but I began to dream of the day when I’d be able to find out.

  In the meantime, I typed term papers and wrote mother for money when she always “forgot” to send my allowance. With the money I earned, Mickey and I would go down to the delicatessen once a week, usually on Saturday, and she’d teach me about Jewish food. I ordered matzo ball soup once, but it wasn’t terrific. My favorites were corned beef, pastrami and poppy seed strudel. We’d all sit and talk for hours about life and our careers after school. Both of us were convinced that we were talented enough to become very successful, and though there was no such thing as women’s lib yet, we were both convinced that marriage would have to wait … maybe forever. We talked about what it would be like to be on our own, about maybe living with someone if you loved them, what we’d tell our parents and much more. Since neither of us had even one day’s real experience with any of these subjects, it was mostly conjecture on our parts.

  Mickey had read more of the philosophy books than I had, but we’d both discovered The Prophet by Gibran. That little book was passed from hand to hand throughout the entire drama department, I think. It made an enormous impression on all of us and was my first introduction to an alternate philosophy of living. Since we were all searching for the meaning of life, which was a popular pursuit, we ran into a lot of different ideas. None were immediately discarded.

  The late fifties were the tail-end of the dark period of literature and underground lifestyles. We were swept away by Camus and Kerouac, by Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O’Neill. We wore jeans to school, which was almost unheard of then, and dressed in black dance leotards. The drama department was definitely set apart from the rest of the primarily “ivy league” school and people could spot us immediately by the strange way we dressed. The difference in clothing originated form having to go from a dance class to English and from there to learning fights in acting class. We were constantly getting dirty and sweaty and you just couldn’t wear regular clothes to do what we did. But, soon, the weirdness became a sort of department trademark, a sign of individualism. Long before it was in fashion, we all let our hair grow and wore funky clothes. The guys used the excuse of being in classical plays but the girls didn’t feel any excuse necessary. We thought it was great.

  That spring I had to have my wisdom teeth pulled and mother decided I should have the dental surgery in New York. However, daddy was also in the hospital and she wrote me this letter a few days previous to my trip.

  March 13, 1957

  Tina darling,

  Thank you for your letter to Miss Elsye.

  I wrote to Mrs. Stuart asking for the doctor’s telephone numbers, but there is no sense in me calling them until the X-rays are taken and in front of them.

  When I offered to come up to be with you for the extraction I thought your father’s operation would be over. We are in the hospital now, but they can’t operate for another week or so, and we must stay here until he is ready for the operation. But please do see that I get the doctor’s names correctly spelled, and the telephone numbers, and when they will have your X-rays in front of them. I think you should plan to have the extraction on the 22nd. I love you dearly, and so wish I could be with you, but I know you understand.

  Please feel free to call me if you have any problems, or any fears.

  All my love -

  Your

  “Mommie”

  I was nearly eighteen years old now. Whenever I thought about her it was as “mother”, but what I called her was still “mommie”. It always made me feel like a little girl to be writing to her as mommie and calling her mommie when I called from school. She still signed her letters to me with quotation marks around “mommie” as though perhaps it was strange to her as well. But that’s the way it went, without any change for many more years.

  She did come to see me in the hospital. I’d had all four wisdom teeth removed and was very uncomfortable. I went from the airport to the hospital and from the hospital to the airport and back to school. The whole thing was a very unpleasant experience for me. My face was very swollen and I couldn’t eat anything for almost two weeks. It was a great diet, but a hell of a way to loose weight.

  Every freshman drama student was assigned someone from the sophomore class to coach them in voice and speech. My “big sister” was Peggy Hughes. Peggy was a special friend. She always cheered me up. Because she also lived off campus, it was always fun to walk over and see her. She lived in one of those Victorian Pittsburgh mansions on Fifth Avenue that had been turned into a boarding house. It was an eccentric place, to say the least. Peggy could always be counted on to liven up the dullest environment, she just had a way of finding the amusing out of any situation. She was a perfect friend for me because I tended to be rathe
r shy at first with strangers. One of Peggy’s best friends in this peculiar but interesting boarding house was a painter named Balcom Green. We used to go and visit him often because he was older than us and usually had some food and a bottle of wine handy. Peggy was never shy about saying anything to anyone, so the three of us spent many a cold winter afternoon laughing and talking about outrageous things.

  April 1, 1957

  Christina darling,

  Thank you so much for your beautiful birthday card, and also for the lovely photographs of yourself.

  I do hope you are truly feeling alright and that your gums are healing rapidly. I was so proud of you when you were in the hospital, you were so brave - a real good trouper!

  I am busier than the proverbial bee, and have so much to do in the way of preparing for the trip to New Orleans. However, I expect I’ll get through it all somehow.

  Stay well and happy, and till next time all my love.

  Your

  “Mommie”

  I knew from the times I did speak to her over the phone that she and Daddy were planning extensive travel to various Pepsi bottling plants, sales meetings and the like. Mother could be counted upon to draw the crowds since she was just about the only big Hollywood star yet to make the transition from filmdom to the business world. In the ’50’s no big stars did commercials for television, no stars were permanently associated with only one product.

  Pepsi Cola was getting more publicity, more overall press coverage from mother’s personal appearances beside daddy on these well-planned business trips than they could have ever bought with regular advertising dollars. Mother had bottles of Pepsi back stage at talk shows, she had a bottle of Pepsi next to her at press conferences, she mentioned the company name whenever she was interviewed for any purpose whatsoever. As daddy pushed the soft drink company ever closer to the number one market spot in the nation through expansion and promotion, mother drew the crowds and got the media attention. But behind all of it was the product … the soft drink that would mark an entire era … the “Pepsi generation” was coming of age.