‘People fantasised about who or what I was that I had this privileged, wealthy, film-star family life. ‘It was the hypocrisy of it that was so difficult,’ she says. But to Christina, the public image was a gilded lie. She lived in a sprawling house in Brentwood, Los Angeles and used her wealth to adopt and raise four children, including Christina, an act much lauded in extensive magazine spreads about her happy family life. Over a career spanning five decades, she starred alongside Clark Gable in Possessed, Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and won a 1945 Best Actress Academy Award for the title role in Mildred Pierce. She was one of the original studio ingenues, an actress who overcame an impoverished childhood to become one of the highest-paid women in the business. To everyone else she was simply Joan Crawford, Hollywood movie star.Īt the height of her fame in the 1940s, Crawford had a considerable reputation to uphold.
She was not the tyrannical harpy who apparently let rip behind closed doors. She was not the alcoholic, given to occasional bursts of sporadic violence. To the wider public, Christina’s mother was not the abusive parent, prone to uncontrolled bouts of fury. It was a side of her mother that no one else ever saw.
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