The Unsettling Reality Of Joan Crawford's Relationship With Her Adopted Daughter

Joan was one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age: just about everyone in the developed world had heard of her. She was the epitome of beauty and glamor during her heyday.

But Joan was reportedly difficult to get along with, too. Her feud with fellow star Bette Davis is still legendary in Hollywood, and is one of the most famous “catfights” of all time.

Some people think Joan actually had a crush on Bette but didn’t know how to process it. After all, she did actually have relationships with women at a time when such behavior was widely regarded as taboo.

Plenty of other people hated Joan too. An anonymous director said in a 1955 edition of Private Lives, “Joan Crawford's power — her abuse of people who refuse to bow to her, her control of the casting, direction, and production of her pictures, is the disgrace of Hollywood."

So Joan was not popular among her co-workers, it’s fair to say. But was she as bad as her daughter Christina alleged? Well, that story is a rather complicated one.

After that, Joan married a man named Phillip Terry, and they decided to adopt another child. They first adopted a boy they named Christopher, but his birth mother claimed him back.

Joan’s last two children were twins Cindy and Cathy — again, they were given “C” names — and they were adopted from the infamous Tennessee Children’s Home Society. The story behind the society is an extremely unpleasant one.

Back in those days, birth parents were out of the picture entirely when it came to adoption. And according to Christina, Joan had told her that her biological mother was dead.

The relationship between Christina and Joan was never a good one. It didn’t help that the Golden-Age star turned to alcoholism as she got older, and would carry a little flask of vodka everywhere with her.

And then there was Christopher. We know for sure that Joan used physical punishment on him — something parents commonly did in those days — because she said so herself.

Joan claimed that other parents had praised her for spanking Chris. After the story had made it to the newspapers, she had received thousands of letters. “To my amazement, with only one exception, all of them approved of my action,” she said.

But that wasn’t the only interesting thing in the article, which was titled “I Chose A Wonderful Family.” The movie star also told the magazine about the vast amounts of chores and discipline to which she subjected her children.

There were other red flags in the article. Joan talked about how she would separate her children from their toys and games and make them give them to local hospitals. This happened “at least” three times a year.

Joan balanced her parenting with her life as a film star, but her career deteriorated as she got older. There wasn’t much around for older actresses, not in those days, and her last major film was the total disaster that was Trog.

Joan lived for less than a decade after Trog. She passed away on May 10, 1977, killed by a heart attack. Her age had been unconfirmed for most of her career, but it’s thought she was 69 when she died.

The actress apparently knew full well that her daughter was planning a book about her. Her own biographer, Charlotte Chandler, wrote about this in her 2008 biography Not The Girl Next Door.

Joan had made a will before her death, but it was a contentious one. She’d left Cindy and Cathy $77,500 each, but she had made no provision at all for her two oldest children.

Just one year later, in 1978 Christina published her tell-all Mommie Dearest. In it, she outright accused Joan of abusing her and her brother Christopher. And what she described of their treatment sounded terrible indeed.

One of the most notable parts of the book involves coat hangers. According to Christina, her mother once absolutely lost it over Christina using wire hangers, which she hated — so she beat her with one!

The New York Times appeared to take Christina’s side when it reviewed Mommie Dearest. “There's a certain poetic justice in seeing Mommie Dearest atop the best‐seller list, earning for Christina and her brother what her mother's last gratuitous slap [being written out of the will] denied them,” said the paper.

Christopher, now a parent himself, was tracked down by the newspapers at the time and he begrudgingly agreed to talk to the Los Angeles Times. The stories of being tied up at night were true, he said, and there was worse.

And there was one more dark story, and it involved Christopher’s child, a little girl named Bonnie. “When Bonnie was born, she had a lot of trouble. She was just a tiny little mass of bones with some skin stretched over them,” Christopher said.

The book was snapped up by audiences of the time, but it certainly had its detractors. And surprisingly, one of them was Bette, the woman Joan had seemingly hated above all others.

“I felt very sorry for Joan Crawford, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my pity, because that’s the last thing she would have wanted — anyone being sorry for her, especially me,” Bette said.

Christina and Christopher hated their mother, but what about the other two Crawford children, Cathy and Cindy? Well, in total contrast they always insisted that Joan hadn’t actually been an abuser.

In 1981 Mommie Dearest was turned into a movie of the same name, starring Faye Dunaway as Joan. And upon the film’s release, Cathy used that opportunity to speak out again.

All the same, Cathy didn’t deny that her mother had hit her from time to time. “Sure, I was spanked,” she said. “With a hairbrush — when, for example, Cindy and I turned our beds into trampolines and mother caught us.”

The making of Mommie Dearest the movie was a drama in and of itself. Dunaway was apparently a nightmare to work with, insisting on a closed set and even refusing to wear old-age makeup in one scene. The finished film was a complete catastrophe.

The fallout from the explosive tell-all that was the Mommie Dearest controversy continued on into the new millennium. In 2008 Chandler’s Not The Girl Next Door was published, and it presented Christina as an ungrateful troublemaker.

Chandler had included the perspective of some of Joan’s friends. The actor Van Johnson told her, “Some people said that Joan was better off being dead when Mommie Dearest came out, because it would have broken her heart, and this way she was spared all that pain. I’m not one of those people. I totally disagree.”

And Douglas Fairbanks Jr, one of Joan’s ex-husbands, was another who was completely insistent on her innocence. For a start, he said, his wife hadn’t ever used wire hangers, only padded ones.

When Not the Girl Next Door came out, Christina took to the media to give her side of things once more. She spoke to The Guardian newspaper about Mommie Dearest and she hadn’t changed any of her story.

Christina also had thoughts about the concept of adoption in general. “She adopted us for the publicity,” she said. “I have tremendous concerns about celebrity adoptions by people like Madonna and Angelina Jolie.”

Although in fact, it seemed as though her mother had actually agreed with her in that respect. The subject of how to handle a child’s adoption had come up during the 1952 “I Chose a Wonderful Family” article.

She went on, in a passage that seems incredibly ironic now, that Christina once told a woman considering adoption, “Mama wanted all of us — she needed us as much as we needed her.” Joan had apparently been so overcome with emotion that she’d cried.

In her interview with The Guardian, Christina remembered the occasion her mother had written about in “I Chose A Wonderful Family” where she and her siblings had been told by Joan to “sacrifice” their Christmas presents. Her mom had presented it as a good thing in the article.

But Joan’s grandchild Casey, the son of Cathy, spoke to The Guardian as well, and he denied that any abuse had been going on. “I have always been very careful not to call Christina a liar, but clearly she had a completely different experience from my mother and my Aunt Cindy,” he said.

In 2019 Christina did another interview with The Guardian when she turned 80. At the time, Mommie Dearest had been turned into a musical and Christina was keen for it to be a success, because the alleged abuse still stung her.

We’ll never know for certain what went on behind closed doors. All we have to go on is the words of all four Crawford kids and Joan herself. But we do know that the movie star certainly had issues with her first two children as they got older.