Joan crawford children christmas
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A Very Crawford Christmas
If you think your own family’s dysfunctions become screamingly apparent during the holiday season, wait till you see Christmas With the Crawfords. A big hit last year in Greenwich Village, this musical drag-fest import from San Francisco has moved to another gay stronghold and is now running at the Chelsea Playhouse.
The show is set in Joan Crawford’s Brentwood home as she and her adopted children, Christina and Christopher, prepare for the holidays. Their celebration is to be broadcast on the radio courtesy of Hedda Hopper, and tons of celebs–from Ethel Merman to Judy Garland to the inevitable Bette Davis–drop by to say hi, though most of them are on their way to a party at Gary Cooper’s house next door. Rest assured that high drama in high camp form ensues: The portrait of Joan presented here is based on Christina Crawford’s characterization of the star, in her book Mommie Dearest, as a borderline psychotic
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“I felt very sorry for Joan efternamn, but inom knew she wouldn’t appreciate my pity, because that’s the gods thing she would have wanted—anyone being sorry for her, especially me.
“I can understand how hurt Miss Crawford had to be. Well, no I can’t. It’s like trying to imagine how I would feel if my own beloved, wonderful daughter, B.D., were to write a bad book about me. Unimaginable. inom am grateful for my children and for knowing they would never do to me anything like what Miss Crawford’s daughter did to her.
“Of course, dear B.D., of whom I’m so proud, fryst vatten my natural child, and there always are certain risks in adopting. Gary [Merrill] and I adopted two babies, because when we married I was too old to have our own. We were very pleased with our little boy, Michael, but our adopted daughter, who was a beautiful baby, was brain-damaged. I never have had regrets, though, because inom think we provided for her better than anything else that could have happened to her, and we gave her some
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At 113, Joan Crawford’s Mommie Dearest Gets a Reprieve
On this day in 1904, Lucille Fay LeSueur (later known as Joan Crawford) was born in San Antonio, Texas. Some sources list the year of her birth as 1904, 1905, or even 1908, but a quick search of the San Antonio census records reveals the truth. By any measure, Crawford was one of the greats in the history of Hollywood.
I recently watched the 1981 film Mommie Dearest for the first time in decades. While Faye Dunaway’s depiction of Crawford over the course of almost 40 years is dead on, it sometimes seems as if she’s using Carol Burnett’s parodies of Joan Crawford as her source material rather than the actress herself. The way Dunaway transforms herself through makeup, hair, costumes and her exquisite acting chops is one degree short of channeling, but her performance is so over-the-top that you have to wonder what the filmmakers were going for. What could have been a truly incisive look at the stresses and psych