Gee, Tell Us What You Really Think
Christina Crawford — yes, the Christina Crawford who wrote the excoriating “Mommie Dearest” memoir about her mother, film star Joan Crawford — has just given her first interview in ten years, timed to the release of an updated version of her infamous tell-all. (This picture of Joan and Christina was taken in 1945.) Here’s the interview, and here’s my favorite quotation from it: “What my mother wanted was fans and puppies, not human beings. She was as close to being a totally manufactured person as I’ve ever met.” Maybe it’s just me, but the older I get the more I understand why a person would prefer pups to people. And why the whole of “Mommie Dearest” (the book, not the 1981 movie with its grossly underappreciated much-more-than-camp performance by Faye Dunaway) is not worth as much as a single frame of Joan Crawford’s Oscar-winning picture, “Mildred Pierce.”
