The legends of Hollywood’s golden age appeared unreal by design, but when Christina Crawford, the oldest of Joan Crawford’s four adopted children, revealed the gruesome reality in her 1978 bombshell, Mommie Dearest, no amount of airbrushing would ever restore the George Hurrell–like veneer to the polished surface.
Three years later, when Paramount released the movie adaptation, they had every intention of securing a second best-actress Oscar for star Faye Dunaway. What they got instead was a misstep into camp, a prestige picture turned horror-movie howler, “the first drag queen role played by a woman,” according to filmmaker John Waters; it cemented Crawford’s legacy as a monster and derailed Dunaway’s career. The term “Mommie Dearest” became a catchall for parental abuse, and quotable lines such as “Tina! Bring me the axe!,” “No wire hangers ever!,” and “Don’t fuck with me, fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” entered the pop-culture lexicon.
How things went sideways is tracked with evenhanded aplomb and good cheer by A. Ashley Hoff in With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic. The movie marked the end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking, writes Hoff. “It was a myth-busting story spilling the beans that Hollywood magic was all smoke and mirrors and diffusion lenses.”
The movie begins in 1938 and lasts until Joan Crawford’s death, in 1977, and paints her as a control freak turned tyrant; she didn’t have Prozac available to help, but she did have 100-proof vodka. At four years old, daydreaming in bed during a nap, Christina peeled the seam of wallpaper in her bedroom. She caught the usual spanking as punishment; then Joan shredded her daughter’s favorite yellow dress, which Christina was made to wear in public for a week. If anyone asked why she was wearing a torn dress, she was instructed to reply, “I don’t like pretty things.”
Christina Crawford’s memoir pioneered the survivor’s tale, and much of Old Hollywood derided the book as a cynical, grave-robbing bit of revenge. Frank Yablans, who as president of Paramount had green-lighted two Godfathers, leapt at the chance to adapt the book. He thought, “Yummy! I can exploit the hell out of this thing,” while later admitting a more personal motivation, as he, too, like Joan Crawford herself, suffered abuse as a child.
“It was a myth-busting story spilling the beans that Hollywood magic was all smoke and mirrors and diffusion lenses.”
Yablans hired Christina Crawford to adapt the book for $250,000 but never seriously planned to use her script for more than inspiration, and rumor had it that everyone from Joan Didion to William Goldman to Tom Stoppard gave it a shot before Yablans, journeyman director Frank Perry (Play It as It Lays), and Tracie Hotchner received final screenwriting credit.
Anne Bancroft was the first choice to play Crawford, with Franco Zeffirelli attached to direct. But Zeffirelli wanted to make a movie about Joan, not Christina. When Paramount put a picture in the trade papers of Bancroft dressed like Crawford, Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, said, “You look like a woman in the home who thinks she looks like Joan Crawford.” According to Brooks’s friend Bruce Vilanch, who wrote the book’s foreword, it was Brooks who warned Bancroft that the movie would be laughed at. “That alone makes him a genius,” says Vilanch.
After Zeffirelli and Bancroft departed, Yablans scrambled for a replacement and eventually settled on Faye Dunaway, of whom Crawford once said, “Of all the actresses—to me, only Faye Dunaway has the talent and the class and the courage it takes to make a real star.” Count Dunaway on Team Joan—she never read Mommie Dearest or met with Christina (who hated the movie) but objected to the portrayal of the Hollywood legend.
By all accounts, Dunaway, who turned 40 during filming, made life miserable for much of the crew, including Diana Scarwid, who plays the adult Christina. When she first met Mara Hobel, who portrays Christina as a child, at a table read, Dunaway raised a wire hanger over her head by way of an introduction. Co-star Rutanya Adla, as Crawford’s loyal maid, was forced to look as dowdy as possible; otherwise, warned Perry, “Faye will have you fired and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Irene Sharaff, a five-time Oscar winner, was coaxed out of retirement to create 56 costumes for Dunaway but nearly quit in frustration. The movie went over-budget due to the star’s constant lateness. There were other mishaps, such as when a $50,000 broach fell off Dunaway during the first day of shooting and was lost in the Malibu sand, despite the crew combing the beach with metal detectors.
In an unpublished memoir, Yablans remembered Dunaway as a nightmare to work with. “She literally became Joan Crawford, and I became Christina.” And while some thought she looked just like Crawford, down to the trademark thick eyebrows, John Wilson, head of the Razzies, said Dunaway “looked like the love child of Frank-N-Furter and Groucho Marx.”
Dunaway has long disavowed the movie and laid the blame on Perry, who told her, “You must have that size, that stature, that madness!” But if the bigness of the performance—which Hoff defends and which had keen admirers in Pauline Kael, Janet Maslin, and Vincent Canby—doomed it to ridicule, it also made it infamous. That’s why we still talk about it today.
“I don’t think it’s so bad it’s good,” Waters says of the movie on the commentary track of the 2006 DVD. “It’s so good, it’s perfect.”
Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic and the curator of the Stacks Reader. He has worked in film editing for Ken Burns, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers