That was what she had wanted, “not a discussion of my insides.” The heart attack may have been brought on by her deteriorating health. The papers announced that she had died of a heart attack, a coronary occlusion. On May 10, 1977, Joan Crawford died in her bedroom in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The problem was I adopted her, but she didn’t adopt me.” I said this about Christopher and now I say it about Christina. “She is her own person, and that person brought me a lot of pain. From 1959 to 1973 she served on the board of Pepsi-Cola. (1929–33) and Franchot Tone (1935–39), as well as to the actor Phillip Terry (1942–46) and Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele (1955 until his death, in 1959). She had been married to two of Hollywood’s leading men, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. In 1962 she had starred opposite her great rival, Bette Davis, in Robert Aldrich’s blockbuster What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the first of a series of camp horror films featuring aging grandes dames of the cinema. She had won the Oscar for best actress in 1946, for Mildred Pierce (ironically, about a mother and an ungrateful daughter), and she had had featured roles in such film classics as Grand Hotel, with John Barrymore and Greta Garbo, in 1932, and George Cukor’s film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, in 1939. Springer had brought me together with her some time earlier in the hope that I could produce an intimate biography of one of the most enduring of Hollywood stars, who had made more than 80 films in a career that started in 1925 and ended in 1970. I prefer to cut off people who want to hurt me, rather than to continue to give them power over me to go on inflicting pain.”Īs we lunched that day, Crawford was dying of cancer. I’ve learned that there are people who will hurt you if you let them-even if you don’t let them.
I find it very positive and comforting and a kind of protection. You know, Johnny, I’ve become a Christian Scientist. “Why spoil days of your life reading a book that can only hurt you? It’s against my beliefs. Springer asked her if she planned to read the book. Obviously referring to her adoption of Christina, she said, “No good deed goes unpunished.” “I suppose she doesn’t think that I’m going to leave her enough or that I’m going to disappear soon enough.” She sighed.
“I think she’s using my name strictly to make money,” Joan told us. They spoke about it with a sense of foreboding, though they had no idea that it would turn out to be the prototype of angry books by the children of stars. It was clear as I listened to Joan Crawford and her longtime friend and publicist, John Springer, at a lunch in 1976, almost two years before the publication of Joan’s daughter Christina’s book Mommie Dearest, that they knew it was forthcoming.
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