However, many of the seamy revelations are confirmed in a recent biography of the actress by Bob Thomas. Skeptics call it a distasteful, distorted, one-sided hatchet job to which Joan Crawford, who died a year and half ago, could not respond. It is a raw and chilling book - both in the treatment of Christina and in the seemingly intense revenge the daughter is now trying to inflict after her mother's death. Crawford insists she tried to show a convoluted love between the two women as well, but what stands out are page after page of beatings and cruelty. and you would have to say 'Yes Mommie Dearest.''Īnd so in a diabolical last word, Christina Crawford has entitled her book 'Mommie Dearest' and it is filled with the passions of hate and an unforgiving memory. If you said, 'Yes, Mommie,' she'd say 'Yes Mommie What?'. As a child she was commanded to call her mother 'Mommie Dearest,' she writes, until the phrase made her want to 'vomit.' At other times she refers to her mother as an 'insane bitch.' But, in person, there is a calmer tone. She relates her childhood nightmares as if by - little inflection, her Nordic-looking high-cheekboned face at most times a mask. I felt as if there was no hope for me, that I was all alone.'Ĭhristina Crawford is 39 now. Recalling that officer's reaction today, Christina says, 'I was horrified and terrified. Christina Crawford writes in her autobiography that a waiting juvenile officer told her that if her mother called authorities again, 'He'd have no choice but to take me to juvenile hall and book me as an incorrigible.' Stopped by a secretary, Joan Crawford went through a familiar ritual of locking her daughter in a storage room in the Beverly Hills mansion viewed as a home of glamorous bliss by unknowing, gawking tourists.Ĭhristina - who had one black eye and a swollen, bloody upper lip, a puffy face and a 'perfect handprint bruise across one cheek' - was then summoned downstairs. She was 13 - and had endured years of cruel and unusual punishment - when her mother tried to strangle her.

The woman who tells the painful, lurid litany of a lifetime of child abuse at the hands of 'Mommie Dearest' is the eldest of her four adopted children, Christina. The mother was Hollywood's Joan Crawford. All I could think of was that my own mother was trying to kill me. I gasped for air and felt myself sinking into unconsciousness. Her eyes were the eyes of a killer animal, glistening with excitement. She banged my head on the floor, tightening her griup around my throat. I lost my footing and fell into the floor, hitting my head on the ice chest as I went down.

with a look in her eyes that will never be erased from my memory. She grabbed for my throat like a mad dog.

Mommie dearest by christina crawford