Joan Crawford is best known as one of Golden Age Hollywood's biggest stars — but after her death, her adopted daughter claimed that she'd physically and emotionally abused her children for decades.
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford was one of the top actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood, but her legacy has been marred by controversy.
Once upon a time, Joan Crawford was Hollywood royalty. The starlet made a name for herself as a Jazz Age flapper, but the defining moments of her career saw her exploring psychologically complex characters in various high-profile dramas. Yet, despite her early success, Crawford came to be labeled as “box office poison” by the end of the 1930s as her films failed to turn a profit.
Unlike other actresses stuck with that label, though, Crawford returned to even greater success and made a name for herself as a career woman when she became a member of Pepsi-Cola’s board of directors. By all metrics, Joan Crawford led a rich, successful life — at least, from the outside looking in.
Joan Crawford’s personal life, on the other hand, was not quite so glamorous. In her own memoirs, she portrayed herself as a doting mother who worked hard to lovingly raise her children. But her own adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, claimed in her memoir Mommie Dearest that her mother was actually an alcoholic abuser. However, this categorization has been a point of contention, even among Joan’s other children, making it difficult to know what really happened in the Crawford household.
In any case, Joan Crawford’s story stands out as one of the most fascinating in the early era of Hollywood.
Joan Crawford’s Life Before She Became A Hollywood Icon
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford’s real name was Lucille Fay LeSueur.
Born Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, on March 23, 1904 (an approximation, as various sources have cited the year of her birth as 1904, 1905, 1906, and 1908), Joan Crawford always dreamed of being a dancer. Working under the name Billie Cassin, Crawford began performing in various nightclubs and traveling choruses.
By the time she was 20, Crawford had made it to Broadway, earning a spot in the chorus line of Innocent Eyes in 1924. That same year, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) offered Crawford a $75-per-week contract, and she made her first silver screen appearance in Lady of the Night (1925) as Norma Shearer’s body double.
Public DomainJohn Gilbert and Joan Crawford in Four Walls (1928).
Studio executives recognized Crawford’s ability to become a star, but they didn’t like her birth name. So, they ran a contest allowing readers of Movie Weekly to vote for her new stage name, leading her to take on the moniker Joan Crawford — which she reportedly hated because it reminded her of “crawfish.”
Her own distaste for her new name aside, it turned out that MGM executives were right in their assessment of her. Soon, Joan Crawford became a genuine star.
Joan Crawford’s Rise, Fall, And Rise Again In Hollywood
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford in 1928, when she was in her mid-20s.
Crawford’s success did not come overnight. She appeared in multiple films each year but not in a leading role. As she described it, many of her early parts saw her cast as “background glamour.” Naturally, she was growing frustrated with these smaller roles, and she sought out her own new opportunities for success.
“But you can’t eat publicity,” she later wrote in her 1962 autobiography, A Portrait of Joan, “and I was hungry — for excitement, for fun, for people, for work. I simply hadn’t enough work, and my vitality was at the explosion point.”
Crawford began promoting herself aggressively, attending various dances and competitions at hotels, beaches, and venues around Los Angeles. She was determined to turn herself into MGM’s next big star.
“I had nothing to go back to,” she recalled. “Hollywood must notice me.”
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford in Humoresque (1946).
Eventually, her efforts paid off, and Crawford began landing starring roles in prominent films. More impressively, she survived the emergence of so-called “talkies” in the wake of 1927’s The Jazz Singer. In short, The Jazz Singer was the first film to feature full sound, including actors’ voice lines. This marked a major shift in the cinematic landscape, and various stars, for a number of reasons, had their careers cut short by the transition to modern films.
Crawford, however, stunned audiences with her performance in MGM’s first all-talking film, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, in which she sang “Got a Feeling for You.” She also put in substantial work to eliminate her Southwestern accent to make her voice more palatable for cinema-goers.
Her success continued through the early 1930s, and as she was one of the few MGM silent film actresses to make a seamless transition into talkies, the studio began to cast her in even more starring roles. In 1937, Life magazine gave Joan Crawford the title “Queen of the Movies,” and she was one of the highest-paid women in the United States. However, by the end of the decade, Crawford’s films were seeing diminishing returns.
The star was dubbed “box office poison” by the Hollywood Reporter in 1938. Harry Brandt, the president of the Independent Theatre Owners Association of America, noted that she had “unquestioned” talent but that her high salary was not reflected in ticket sales.
After a few box office flops with MGM in the early 1940s, Crawford asked to be released from her contract, and it was terminated in June 1943.
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryThe poster for Mildred Pierce.
Then, after a two-year break from acting, Joan Crawford signed a new deal with Warner Bros., ultimately leading to her starring role in Mildred Pierce in 1945. Crawford played the title character, a femme fatale whose second husband is murdered. The film set the stage for the latter half of Crawford’s career, reigniting interest in her films at the box office and cementing her as a phenomenal dramatic actor. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.
In her memoir, Crawford said she approached Mildred Pierce “with all the gusto I’d been saving for three years, not a Crawford mannerism, not a trace of my own personality.”
Of course, throughout all of this, Crawford’s personal life also underwent numerous changes.
Joan Crawford’s Tumultuous Personal Life And Relationships
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford and her second husband, Franchot Tone.
In 1929, Crawford married Douglas Fairbanks Jr., whose father and stepmother, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, were Hollywood royalty. They were not in favor of the marriage initially, and although that eventually changed, the relationship between Fairbanks Jr. and Crawford was anything but ideal. Four years after they eloped, they divorced, with Crawford citing “grievous mental cruelty,” “a jealous and suspicious attitude,” and “loud arguments about the most trivial subjects” as the reasons, according to a TIME report from 1933.
Then, in 1935, at the height of her career at MGM, Crawford married fellow actor Franchot Tone, despite her initial hesitance due to how recently her last marriage had ended. Something about Tone must have convinced her, however, and their marriage seemed to be healthy at first. Tone had a passion for acting and intended to use his film earnings to finance his own theater troupe.
The two appeared in several movies together throughout the 1930s, but not all was well behind the scenes. After two miscarriages, their dreams of becoming parents were crushed. Tone, meanwhile, had allegedly begun to drink heavily, leading to further allegations of physical abuse. It was also around this time that Crawford engaged in a six-month affair with 17-year-old actor Jackie Cooper, whom she’d known since he was a little boy.
Once again, Crawford filed for divorce, and it was finalized in 1939.
Los Angeles Times Digital Archive, UCLA LibraryJoan Crawford with her son Christopher.
But Crawford wouldn’t put her dreams of becoming a mother aside. In 1940, she adopted her first child, Christina, through an agency in Las Vegas, as she couldn’t legally adopt a child as a single mother in California. Then, in 1942, Crawford married actor Phillip Terry, and the two adopted their second child, a boy they named Christopher. However, the situation grew complicated. Christopher’s birth mother caught wind that Crawford was the person who had adopted the infant and proceeded to attempt to blackmail the actress. As a result, the child was returned to his birth mother — who then put him back up for adoption.
In 1943, Terry and Crawford adopted another boy, naming him Phillip Terry Jr. But when Crawford and Terry divorced in 1946, Crawford changed her son’s name, once again, to Christopher. The next year, in 1947, Joan Crawford adopted twins, Cathy and Cynthia, from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, which was infamous for kidnapping infants and essentially selling them for a profit.
Crawford then married her fourth and final husband, Alfred Steele, nearly a decade later, in May 1955. They remained together until Steele’s death in 1959.
Los Angeles Public LibraryJoan Crawford with her fourth and final husband, Alfred Steele.
While Cathy and Cynthia only ever had positive things to say about their mother, however, the same cannot be said of Christopher and Christina. In fact, shortly before Joan Crawford’s death from a heart attack on May 10, 1977, she altered her will, disinheriting her two older children for “reasons which are well known to them.”
The following year, Christina Crawford made these reasons known to the public when she published her memoir, Mommie Dearest.
The Controversy Surrounding ‘Mommie Dearest’
It’s common for people to feel angry when a loved one dies — it’s one of the five stages of grief — but the anger described by Christina in Mommie Dearest is not anger at the universe for taking her mother from her. Instead, it is fury at the treatment she and Christopher received at Crawford’s hands for years.
In her memoir, Christina claimed that Joan Crawford physically and emotionally abused her and her brother. She alleged that Crawford beat her and Christopher with wire hangers and carried out “night raids” in which she drunkenly stormed into their bedrooms and forced them to clean up messes they hadn’t made.
Gene Lester/Getty ImagesChristina and Joan Crawford in matching outfits.
Mommie Dearest would go on to become a bestselling book, and it was even adapted into a film starring Faye Dunaway in 1981. For a time, many people took the book’s words at face value, believing Joan Crawford to be the monster Christina portrayed her as.
However, other people in Crawford’s life — even her rival, Bette Davis — came to her defense in the wake of Mommie Dearest. In fact, Davis even went as far as to deem the book “trash.” Douglas Fairbanks Jr. likewise defended Crawford, saying it would have been “out of character” for her to abuse her children. Cathy Crawford also denounced the book, saying that her sister “lived in her own reality.”
Crawford, of course, never got to respond to the allegations made against her in the book, and it certainly adds a layer of uncertainty to her legacy. However, given her ongoing charity work throughout her life and her many bona fides, it’s safe to say that, for the most part, history will remember Joan Crawford fondly.
After learning all about Joan Crawford, go inside the story of notorious pin-up girl Bettie Page. Then, read about the death of Joan Rivers.
