With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic

By A. Ashley Hoff and Bruce Vilanch

When she died in 1977, Joan Crawford was remembered as an icon of Hollywood's Golden Age—until publication the following year of her daughter's memoir, Mommie Dearest.

Christina Crawford's book was an immediate bestseller, combining the infrequently discussed topic of child abuse with the draw of Hollywood drama.

But when Paramount Pictures released the film version, starring Faye Dunaway as Crawford, it was panned, and it remains one of the most legendary critical bombs in film history. The lavish, big-screen adaptation drew unexpected laughter for its over the top the scenes depicting life in the Crawford household. Rarely have such good intentions been met with such ridicule.

Despite this, the movie was a commercial success and remains, four decades later, immensely popular as an unintentional camp classic. Based on new interviews with people connected to the book and the film—from cast and crew members to industry insiders—With Love, Mommie Dearest details the writing and selling of Christina's book and the aftermath of its publication, as well as the filming of the motion picture, whose backstage drama almost surpassed what was viewed on-screen in the film.

Hollywood historian A. Ashley Hoff explores the phenomenon, the camp, and the very real social issues addressed by the book and film.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781641608718

Book preview

PROLOGUE

AUGUST 1981

PRODUCER FRANK YABLANS KNEW he had gold, absolute cinematic gold.

Yablans was hand-carrying a print of Mommie Dearest across the country for a pair of special advance screenings he arranged for New York critics and influencers, the East Coast columnists and opinion makers who might recognize and promote the movie’s importance.

Film critic Roger Ebert described him thus: "Yablans, a wiry, balding man with an excess of energy, used to be the studio head at Paramount before he left to become an independent producer. He averages about one film every two years, and his credits range from The Other Side of Midnight to North Dallas Forty. He thinks Mommie Dearest is the sort of movie that the big Hollywood studios were born to make."

He began in film distribution, a scrappy guy with nothing but plain old chutzpah and a drive to succeed, delivering cans of film from movie house to movie house, and here he was all these years later, doing the exact same thing. At least now he was better paid, garnered respect, and felt like a real part of the process.

The previous year, Robert Redford made his directorial debut with Ordinary People, a movie exploring the tenuous family dynamic between a brittle mother, played by former sitcom actress Mary Tyler Moore, and her troubled young son, played by Timothy Hutton. The quiet, family-driven story was well received by critics and audiences alike, garnering four Oscars and a host of other awards. Yablans felt Mommie Dearest, the story of a similarly tense relationship between a daughter and a mother—with an added veneer of glamour because the mother in his movie was film legend Joan Crawford—had the chance to be even bigger.

He believed in this product, so much so that he convinced the studio, Paramount Pictures, to open the movie one week earlier in New York than originally planned, to avoid conflicting with the New York Film Festival.

Frank Yablans was a major force, and smart and savvy, recalled one former Paramount studio executive (quoted throughout this book, who shall remain nameless). He might have been a bit of a bull in a china shop, but sometimes that’s what you have to be. I think he was an absolutely well-respected, major producer at that time.

For months the press had been speculating about how a big-screen adaptation of Christina Crawford’s memoir would play, what it would look like, and who would be able to play the role of her mother, the glamorous movie star Joan Crawford.

After winning the film rights from Christina Crawford, author of Mommie Dearest, Yablans spent the next four years trying to get the movie made. Directors were chosen, then dropped, then replaced. Same with the lead actress.

The director who finally ended up with the job was Frank Perry. In a profile of the filmmaker, columnist Rex Reed wrote:

Mommie Dearest is Frank Perry’s first film in five years. Before that, he had a string of flops. He knows that a lot is riding on this one. An early success, he became a leading American film director with his very first effort, the low-budgeted David and Lisa. Several hit films followed, in collaboration with his wife, Eleanor Perry. When their marriage ended in 1970, neither of them ever regained the prominence they had experienced as a team.

But in the past few years, he’s been rewriting his life. Eleanor died, he married writer Barbara (Little Gloria, Happy at Last) Goldsmith, went on a rigid self-improvement kick, watched his weight drop from 260 to 200 pounds and now insists he’s "never been happier or more focused—and thank God, because if I had been unhealthy or confused I would never have had the strength to finish Mommie Dearest." At 51, he says he’s in command of his tools, his trade and his life.

And since everything else seemed to be on the upswing, Frank Perry knew this picture was going to be a hit. It just had to be.

Faye Dunaway was one of the biggest stars around. She was beautiful and fierce, with a subdued sexiness.

If you’re lucky, you get one. One classic. One iconic role or film. Had she dropped dead after Bonnie and Clyde premiered, she’d still be in the history books. But not only had she starred in that—her breakout role—she went on to make Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s neo-noir thriller, and Network, for which she received the Oscar.

But she, too, needed another hit. Her last few movies did nothing to enhance her reputation. And she had just turned forty, a precarious moment in any actress’s life and career. On top of that, Dunaway had a reputation for being difficult. The press labeled her temperamental. She saw herself as a perfectionist.

But when Faye Dunaway entered a room, you knew it. The air crackled with tension and excitement. When she appeared on-screen, audiences snapped to attention. The Franks knew that. Working with her on Mommie Dearest was tough, but both Yablans and Perry admitted they’d do it again in a heartbeat because they believed the results were spectacular. And they were convinced Dunaway would win a second Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as actress Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest.

Making Mommie Dearest was an uphill battle from the start, not only because of the multiple writers hired to draft the screenplay or the long search for just the right director or even the lead actress who dropped out at the last minute, only to be replaced by Dunaway. Barry Diller, the executive heading Paramount at the time (to whom Yablans had to answer) pulled a last-minute stunt, demanding Yablans trim the budget by $300,000 or the picture would be canceled.

Why would he do that? Yablans asked himself and anyone listening, ignoring the bad blood running for years between them. No matter. Yablans solved the problem by eliminating a key scene early in the movie—an important but expensive one to film. Because Yablans wanted the picture made, out it went. And once he made the budget changes Diller wanted, he was never bothered again.

At least during filming.

It was a Hollywood movie produced by a Hollywood studio taking on a Hollywood legend, with most of the reviews and reviewers emanating from Hollywood.

Hence Frank Yablans’s trip to New York. Out of Hollywood. Away from the West Coast critics who might have an axe to grind against the film, the star, or Yablans himself.

This was an unprecedented movie event.

A glamorous deglamorization of glamour.

A demystification of the Hollywood mystique.

And on some, perhaps subliminal, level it was Yablans coming to terms with his own horrible relationship with his mother. Among his colleagues, Yablans discussed winning the rights to Christina Crawford’s book in crass terms, as a story he could exploit and make a buck on. But the truth was, he came from an abusive childhood, and he felt a kinship to the story. It was a selling point he used in winning over Crawford, when she was unsure who should film her memoir.

Yablans and Crawford weren’t the only ones abused as children. Frank Perry had a similar experience. His father was a violent drunk who beat the shit out of him whenever he did anything wrong, or [stood] up for his brothers, explained Justin Bozung, Frank Perry’s official biographer. Maybe Crawford was right. Maybe it was a national epidemic, one not widely discussed, at least not until her book was published. Making her book into a film would really give the topic some exposure. So, Mommie Dearest was more than just crass commercialization. It was a message picture, but one so eye-poppingly glamorous it contained the best of everything movies have to offer.

It was sure to be a hit.

The Franks (as producer Frank Yablans and director Frank Perry came to be known while working as a team) knew how to guarantee a full house: by offering their guests an exclusive invitation to a special, industry-only screening of a highly anticipated new movie. Oh, yes, and free food. The screenings both nights were followed by a light supper.

This was the approach The Franks used to introduce Mommie Dearest to some two hundred influential New Yorkers. They held their first private screening and supper on Wednesday night, August 26, 1981, on the twenty-ninth floor of the Gulf and Western Building at 15 Columbus Circle in New York City, a forty-four-story black-and-silver-striped skyscraper, and did the same thing the following night with a different guest list. It was just very informal, remembered Michael Musto, invited to one of the screenings. It wasn’t the way they do things now, where it’s all very regimented.

Musto was a freelance journalist at the time. Can I just start blabbin’ about this? he practically gushed with excitement at the thought of sharing this memory. He continued:

I went to a press screening of it, the year it came out, 1981. And I was so excited about this movie, which I felt worked on every level, that I couldn’t even wait to get home to call a friend.

After the screening, I found this working phone booth—this is how long ago this was, we’re talking phone booths—and I called my friend and I said, I’ve just seen the best movie I have ever seen. It works on every level. It’s a hagiography, it’s a cautionary tale, it’s a horror story, it’s a fashion show. It’s camp. It’s funny. It’s harrowing.

I just thought it worked like gangbusters, and I was so excited about it. Some of the lines just popped off the screen, like, What is this, an institution of learning, or a teenage brothel? or "I think you’re under-reacting, Mrs. Chadwick!" But beyond that I actually thought Faye threw herself into the role with such commitment that she had become Joan Crawford.

Loads of people took the movie seriously. At least, in the beginning. But John Wilson, creator of the Razzies (the awards gleefully celebrating the best of Hollywood’s worst), wondered, How did Frank Perry watch these seminal scenes that everyone remembers, the wire hangers, the scrubbing the bathroom floor, the taking the axe to the rosebushes, the ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ I mean, that movie is just chockablock with scenes that anyone in their right mind stumbling on the set would have been … I wonder if there are any takes they couldn’t use because the crew were laughing.

One person who did not attend the screenings, either in New York or later in Los Angeles, was Christina Crawford, the author of the book Mommie Dearest, on which the movie was based. A few weeks earlier, on August 3, 1981, while getting ready for publication of her second book and the grueling book tour likely to follow, Crawford, at the age of forty-one, suffered a massive stroke on the left side of her brain. Three days later, Dr. Milton Heifetz performed a cranial bypass, and when the surgery was complete, her husband, David Koontz, was informed his wife had a 1 percent chance of survival.

But Christina Crawford was always a survivor.

So while Christina fought for her life in a hospital, a movie about her life was about to open nationwide. In the meantime, her husband went on her behalf to one of the studio screenings. Her husband, David Koontz, is her eyes and ears, Frank Perry told reporters. He was delighted with the film.

That wasn’t remotely true. Instead, as Crawford wrote, He came home depressed and discouraged. The film tried to justify the bizarre behavior of Joan Crawford by blaming it on exterior events or the misdoings of her daughter.

She continued,

David tried at first to keep the bad news about the film from me. I had been home from the hospital less than a month. He was under doctor’s orders not to allow any stress or emotional upset to reach me. My condition, though temporarily stable, was nevertheless still precarious. There was absolutely no way for the medical team to predict whether or not the hospital treatment would continue to function adequately.

So, for the moment, David had to bear the brunt of all the disappointment, frustration and remorse over the way in which the film had been made.

The movie opened after months of being touted as an awards-worthy, blockbuster motion picture. It had every credential: based on a bestselling book, Oscar-winning actress, acclaimed director. Everyone expected a good movie. But the reviews were not what The Franks or Christina Crawford or Faye Dunaway quite expected. Instead of a serious drama or an awards contender, the movie was considered melodrama, and critics lampooned what they called Dunaway’s overacting.

Newspaper articles claimed moviegoers at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood howled with laughter. The Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that audiences talked back to the screen and pranksters showed up to screenings with wire hangers, hoping to participate in the movie as if it were a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But was it true, or were these stories planted by someone to discredit the movie? The initial newspaper ads featured an elegant Faye Dunaway dressed in a formal gown, a jeweled necklace at her throat, looking every inch a Golden Age Hollywood star. A week later, the ad campaign was changed to something emphasizing the camp factor.

As Jonathan Zimbert, one of Frank Yablans’s assistants, explained,

All that came about during the opening weekend because the marketing campaign was orienting it to what The Franks and the studio thought they had, which was a serious drama, this Academy Award– winning great American tragedy. And it wasn’t until Saturday or Sunday when it was clear, based on the studio feedback they were getting. People were already showing up in costume and screaming, Drop the baby! Throw the baby! when she’s up cuddling it on the stairs, like they knew ahead of time, within days, because the word was out that this was a hoot.

So, yeah, there was a certain crowd that was there, and Paramount said, the regular people we thought were gonna go, they’re not going. So—fuck it. And they changed the ad campaign and they leaned into it, and it worked. The Franks weren’t happy with it at all, but it worked.

It did indeed seem to work. The box-office receipts from the opening weekend nationwide totaled $4,667,761, and after seventeen days, the film grossed $10.5 million, already making its money back. Mommie Dearest may well have been critically panned, but it was not a commercial failure.

In late October, husband by her side, Christina Crawford summoned the courage to see the movie version of her memoir. I had talked with people and read the reviews, so I was prepared, she remembered. As the movie unfolded, she told herself that this was not her, this was not her mother, this was not her story.

When I finally saw the picture with David in a small neighborhood theatre that was nearly empty, my heart broke, she continued. What an incredible opportunity they had lost. This picture could have been a milestone. It could have been the very first film to delve into the problem of family violence from the point of view of a child. It could have explained the complex personal interactions of the mother and daughter, giving insights into the larger problem of child abuse. But it didn’t. It was a series of hysterical scenes without explanation or relationship development.

If there was one saving grace from Crawford’s perspective, it was that during filming she heard that Faye Dunaway had promised reporters the end result would protect Joan Crawford’s image as a loving, doting mother. Christina Crawford was afraid the movie would whitewash her mother’s character, but the exact opposite happened. The woman Dunaway portrayed on-screen was a gorgon.

Forty years after the release of Mommie Dearest, this author placed a phone call to a former Paramount executive and, surprisingly, the call was returned.

This will be a short phone call, the executive stated emphatically, "because I don’t want my name in any way associated with this movie, because I don’t want to get an angry phone call from Faye Dunaway! That’s a call I would rather avoid, actually."

As it turned out, our phone call wasn’t all that short, and an hour later the conversation ended on an upbeat note, with the executive wishing this book great success. Like it or not, love it or leave it, it’s certainly a memorable film, admitted the executive. And it has stood the test of time!

So many good intentions went into the making of Mommie Dearest. And it wasn’t like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, where sheer incompetence was to blame from the start. But instead of the cinematic masterpiece the filmmakers hoped for, the end result was one of the most notorious camp classics in Hollywood history.

1 BECAUSE I AM NOT ONE OF YOUR FANS!

WE, THE VIEWERS, ARE watching the movie, and it’s the chilling confrontation between a much bigger, scarier figure and a little girl cowering beside her bed.

Yes, Mommie, the little girl answers hesitantly, to a question put to her by the woman she calls her mother.

"Yes, Mommie what?" the wildly contorted face chillingly snarls.

Yes, Mommie dearest, the girl responds obediently, enveloped by fear.

The frightening visage slathered in cold cream takes it all in, never blinking. When I taught you to call me that, I wanted you to mean it.

The line is delivered with a pathos that almost makes us, the audience, side with the big, scary figure and almost understand her rage and frustrations. It’s a line delivery that tells us even monsters need love, and maybe that lack of love is why monsters become so scary.

But that doesn’t help the little girl in front of her, shaking with fear.

‘Mommie dearest’ was a term of enslavement, explained Christina Crawford, opening up about the reason for her book’s title. If we just called her ‘Mother’ or ‘Mommy,’ she corrected us over and over and over again. Despite claims that she made her story up because she held some warped vendetta against her adoptive mother, there is corroboration to some of Crawford’s various claims.

Broadway actress (and close friend of Joan Crawford’s) Helen Hayes remembered, When my son Jim came to stay with me, we would go out to lunch with them. Joan would snap, ‘Christopher!’ whenever he tried to speak. He would bow his little head, completely cowed, and then he’d say, ‘Mommie Dearest, may I speak?’ Joan’s children had to say, ‘Mommie Dearest, may I speak?’ before she’d allow them to utter another word.

After publication of Mommie Dearest, in which Crawford detailed her experiences growing up in a dysfunctional household, she wrote a novel. Then she authored a third book—a lesser-known sequel, if you will, to Mommie Dearest—titled Survivor, detailing her recovery not only from her traumatic childhood and youth but also from the experiences she endured following publication of her first bestselling book and the critically lambasted movie based on it.

It is hard to remember that there was a time when the word ‘dearest’ after someone’s name didn’t carry a negative double meaning, Crawford wrote in Survivor, when ordinary hangers made of wire were not synonymous with anything other than the dry cleaners, when the connotation of the term ‘Mommie Dearest’ had not been incorporated into everyday American language, and when child abuse was a hidden family tragedy not discussed in public, not recognized as a national issue. But that was before my book was published early in November 1978.

The movie version of Mommie Dearest opens one morning as Joan Crawford, movie star, wakes up in the luxurious bedroom of her luxurious mansion in Brentwood. Surrounded by movie-star trappings, she prepares for her day like any other worker bee—she is driven to the studio and made up for the scene she is about to play and voilà, we, the audience, are introduced to Joan Crawford: Movie Star.

Just who, exactly, was Joan Crawford?

We, the audience, have no clue (except for those of us who already do). All we know is, in the late thirties, and pretty much throughout the run of the film, Joan Crawford was a movie star. Period.

So, we ask ourselves once again: Just who was Joan Crawford?

Joan Crawford came out of nowhere, or as close to nowhere as is consistent with actually having a birthplace and a past, David Denby wrote in the New Yorker. It’s a good line, and pretty accurate.

She was born Lucille LeSeuer in San Antonio, Texas, and later went by Billie Cassin. (Billie was a nickname, and Cassin came from her stepfather.) She might have been born in 1905. Or 1906. Or 1907. Her parents may or may not have been married when she was born, but either way, her father abandoned the family ten months later. Whether she was stung by the mark of illegitimacy or merely abandonment, it colored the rest of her life.

Evidence suggests she might have been a battered child. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Possibly sexually. I have it on pretty good authority that my mother was beaten as a child and even sexually abused, Christina Crawford said in one interview, and enough of Joan’s biographers seem to concur. The details are fuzzy because most people experiencing any kind of abuse rarely choose to discuss and relive it.

We know this much: Joan Crawford’s childhood was Dickensian. She was forced to support herself from the age of eleven by waiting tables and scrubbing floors and ironing shirts in a laundry. She was harshly disciplined by her mother and by the supervisors in the boarding schools where she worked for her education.

To her credit, she survived. And succeeded. But it turned her into a pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of person who, once she found success, forgot that without any boots in the first place, it’s pretty hard to pull yourself up. Especially if no one helps you do the pulling. So, if the children she adopted lacked her resilience, nerve, or canny sense of know-how, she didn’t seem to harbor much sympathy, only a resigned sense of disappointment.

Hollywood has always been a land of transformation, although what one could transform oneself into was never quite what one had initially anticipated. To whatever degree, this is what young Lucille LeSueur, otherwise known as Billie Cassin, thought when she arrived in Hollywoodland, and by and large that’s what actually happened. She certainly did transform herself into something more polished and sleek than what she started as, but as with everything, there is a hidden price.

After working as a chorus girl, she made it out to Los Angeles and was signed to a contract with MGM in 1925. She was so eager for stardom that the following year she took part in a name-the-actress publicity stunt sponsored by Movie Weekly magazine. Because Lucille LeSueur was deemed too hard to remember, readers were invited to rename the otherwise-memorable starlet. At first, Joan Arden was chosen, only there was already an actress bearing that moniker. The second choice, Joan Crawford, stuck. (Crawford herself famously loathed it in the beginning, saying it reminded her of crawfish, but over time it grew on her.)

The image most people had of her, accurate or not, was that Joan Crawford embodied upwardly mobile working-class women, usually shopgirls, climbing the ladder of success, finding some type of redemption—and true love—along the way. The name change fit with the actress’s image as a self-made creation.

The mark of official acceptance in Hollywood was an invitation to Pickfair, the home of the town’s biggest movie stars, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. An invitation to Pickfair meant you had arrived.

Upon their marriage in 1920, Fairbanks gifted Pickford the land and transformed the house sitting on it into a lavish mock-Tudor mansion. It became the most famous house in the country, what Life magazine called a gathering place only slightly less important than the White House … and much more fun. It was the first private home in the Los Angeles area to include an in-ground swimming pool, in which Pickford and Fairbanks were famously photographed paddling a canoe. The house was brimming with art and antiques. Among the celebrated guests: movie stars like Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin but also Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and H. G. Wells.

But one person who was not invited to Pickfair was Joan Crawford, even after she began dating, then married, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. He was nineteen and rakishly handsome, widely considered the crown prince of Hollywood. She was around twenty-three and vivacious, having transformed herself from a merely pretty starlet into a sophisticated star.

But despite the marriage, no invitations arrived from Pickfair to join in the fun. No dinner parties. No Sunday afternoon games. Not even an afternoon high tea. Fairbanks Jr. ignored the oversight, but Crawford didn’t, and neither did the rest of the town. It was openly gossiped that her in-laws, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., were unhappy with the union.

Finally, an invitation arrived, but only after the movie magazines openly questioned why the bride and groom were not being received by the groom’s parents.

An oft-repeated story illustrates how Crawford was determined to show them where she stood with young Fairbanks. When they finally arrived at Pickfair for dinner, Crawford surreptitiously untied the strap on her shoe just before entering the fabled mansion. It was a big party and all eyes focused on them. Suddenly, Crawford exclaimed, Oh, Doug, my shoe has come unfastened. Would you fix it for me? He bent over to retie her shoe. The Fairbanks heir found himself at Joan Crawford’s feet in front of the Hollywood elite—and this was the image Joan Crawford wanted to project.

They were divorced in 1933.

After her divorce from Fairbanks, Crawford married three more times and raised four adopted children. Her once glorious film career slowly petered out, as the roles for women her age dwindled. Still, she persevered, finding her own projects when needed (such as the now-classic thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) and treating every project, even her last low-budget sci-fi flick Trog, as if it were an A-list MGM picture.

She gave it her all, even in Trog. It’s why those tour buses pointed out her house back in the day, and it’s why she’s remembered today. It’s also why, when her eldest daughter told her own story—one criticizing the revered movie star’s image—she faced an uphill battle.

Joan Crawford’s image was the all-American success story until Christina Crawford’s book was published. Later biographers of Joan have explained away Christina’s claims, reasoning that she may have exaggerated the sheer number or severity of incidents, or failed to make the distinction between responsible parental discipline and abuse. Or that Christina and Christopher Crawford were troublemaking children prone to mischief.

Christina’s detractors have long alleged she planned to write a tell-all long before her mother’s passing. One could easily read a certain amount of vindictiveness in the idea of Daughter Dearest plotting a poison-pen tome about the parent she blamed for a failing acting career, a lack of revenue, or a failed marriage. But if the detractors search far back enough, they might discover evidence for the reasons behind the vitriol.

As soon as news came out about publication of Christina’s book, many of Joan’s friends came to her defense. Bob Hope. Van Johnson. Barbara Stanwyck. I think it’s disgraceful, said Cesar Romero, a close friend of the family. I never saw Joan mistreat her children. Yet in Bob Thomas’s biography on Crawford, Romero was quoted as telling the star, My God, Joan, why don’t you ease up! They’re only kids. Most of those defending Joan said they never read Mommie Dearest.

Possibly Joan’s most passionate defender was her friend, the actress Myrna Loy, who knew Joan since the twenties and was quoted as saying, I can tell you that when you made a friend in Joan you had a friend for life. She never forgot your birthday, and you’d get a congratulatory note from her when good things happened in your life. She cared about people and her friends, no matter what anybody says. I liked her, and I miss her, and I think her daughter’s stories are pure bunk. Even if they were true, if ever there was a girl who needed a good whack it was spoiled, horrible Christina. Believe me, there were many times I wanted to smack her myself.

It’s the line even if they were true that stands out. Besides, anyone who knew Joan Crawford knew that the last thing she ever did was