Joan Crawford’s childhood, she once reportedly said, was brutal: there was "not one goddamn moment on the Good Ship Lollipop.” Her daughter Christina clearly shared that sentiment. In 1978, a year after her mother’s death, Christina published her explosive memoir, Mommie Dearest*—*forever altering the public’s perception of the Oscar-winning star of classics including The Women, Humoresque, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

“Kids are the wisest judges of all. They can instantly spot the difference between the way people act and what they really are,” Joan writes in 1971’s My Way of Life. If Christina’s brutal claims are true, her mother’s elegant, stately public persona was the careful creation of an “insensitive, cruel, monstrous bitch.” Bitter, dark, and biting, Mommie Dearest purports to unmask Joan as a child abuser, a manipulative liar, and a narcissistic alcoholic. It’s exceedingly upsetting material, more so than you’d expect if your only association is the campy 1981 film adaptation of Christina’s book.

For her part, in My Way of Life (an unintentionally hilarious lifestyle tome) and 1962’s A Portrait of Joan: The Autobiography of Joan Crawford, Joan speaks of childrearing in glowing terms—though bitterness creeps in when she writes of Christina and Christopher, the oldest of her four adopted children. When she died in 1977, Joan left her elder children nothing in her will, “for reasons which are well known to them.” So Christina decided to have the last word, and expose her mother’s alleged abuse to the world. “As we walked out into the cool night air, I held onto my husband’s hand and thought ... at last it is over,” Christina writes in Mommie Dearest. “But ... is it?”

More Orphaned Than Annie

“I was born working,” Joan Crawford writes in My Way of Life.

Originally named Lucille LeSueur, Crawford always stated that she was born in 1908 (although Christina claims it was 1904) in San Antonio. When her father, Thomas LeSueur, left the family when she was only ten months old, her mother, Anna, was left to raise Lucille and her brother alone.

Anna soon married Henry Cassin, who ran a vaudeville house in Oklahoma. Lucille changed her name to Billie Cassin and worshiped the man she believed to be her father and his showbiz associates. “I literally danced through the days, a butterfly, a bird. I never walked. I ran, danced, jumped, leaped,” she writes.

But 7-year-old Billie’s childhood was destroyed when she discovered a cache of stolen gold coins hidden in the basement. Henry Cassin was accused of embezzlement, and the family moved to Kansas City, but he soon took off. To add insult to injury, her brother Hal revealed to Billie that Cassin was not her real father.

The family fell into terrible poverty, living and working together in a tiny laundry Anna managed. Billie was eventually sent to a boarding school, where she was a “working student.” But “in true Dickens fashion,” Joan writes, she was treated as an outcast, rarely attending class and suffering at the hands of her headmistress. “She grabbed me by the hair, threw me down a flight of stairs to the basement and beat me with that broom handle until I was dazed,” she writes. “’I’ll teach you to work if I have to kill you,’ she shrilled.”

And work she did. After a failed stint in college, the eager Billie became a chorus girl and was noticed by J.J. Shubert, who cast her in his show Innocent Eyes. Still a teenager, Billie was on her own, but scars from her traumatic childhood remained. “When I became famous and had enough money to buy anything, do you know what I would have bought if I could have?” Joan mused decades later to Charlotte Chandler, author of Not the Girl Next Door. “My childhood.”

The Try-hard

In 1925, Billie Cassin was signed to a contract with MGM. Renamed through a “name-a-star” contest, the newly christened Joan Crawford became known as the queen of the Charleston, achieving Hollywood notoriety for her hard-hitting drive and style. “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, per biographer Bob Thomas. “Dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.”

But Joan knew the truth behind her madcap antics. “I fooled him,” she writes in one of her own books. “Talent for living indeed…Exhibitionism was mere camouflage for heartbreak.” So Joan set about remaking herself into a lady—and a star. In A Portrait of Joan, she is honest discussing her painful “inferiority complex” and determination to succeed. According to Joan, her first husband, the dashing nepo baby Douglas Fairbanks Jr., joked that if “I heard of a director or producer or writer who had a part that might be right for me, I’d camp on his front doorstep until I got it. The fact is, I watched the front door and the back.”

Throughout the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, Joan became a superstar playing working class girls desperate to better their lives. The same was true for Joan herself. She is at her most sympathetic describing her attempts to give herself the education she had desperately wanted, and the lengths she went to obtain it. “The demands I make on myself are fantastic,” she writes. “I expect perfection. I get it, at rare moments — but they’re too rare.”

But one thing was missing in her picture-perfect life. After a series of devastating miscarriages and the dissolution of her second marriage to Franchot Tone, Joan decided to adopt her own child—facilitated, Christina claims, by the gangster Meyer Lansky since adoption by a single woman was illegal in California. The girl was born on June 11, 1938. “When the baby was ten days old, she was brought to me—the ugliest little mite I’d ever seen,” Joan writes. “But she grew into a blue-eyed, blonde-haired doll… and I gave her all my love and attention.”

A Potemkin Childhood

“I was hers alone,” Christina Crawford writes in the opening pages of Mommie Dearest. “Through the lavish affection, attention and adornment she showered upon me, she tried to make up for the poverty of her own childhood. I was to be the best, the most beautiful, the smartest, quickest, most special child on the face of the earth.”

To little Christina, constantly assured by Joan she was special because she was chosen, “the sun rose and set on my beautiful goddess mother.” Christina was bred to be the ideal child and relished pleasing her mother. “My clothes were certainly gorgeous, my manners impeccable, my curtsey smooth, my hair beautiful and golden,” she writes. “There was no doubt about it … I was the incarnation of the perfect child.”

There were mother-daughter photo shoots, where the two wore matching outfits. There were lavish birthday parties, and Christmases “like a department store delivered under our tree.” But according to Christina, she and her younger brother, Christopher, and twins Cathy and Cindy were little more than props—not allowed to keep most of the presents bestowed on them, yet forced to write endless thank-you notes for the gifts.

“I just wanted to scream at them that it was all a fake,” she writes. “There really was no Christmas and this was all a scene from another movie starring Joan Crawford and her four lovely children … the epitome of the glamorous movie star in the make-believe world of beauty and happiness forever.”

But Joan and Christina had moments of true connection, away from the false tinsel of Tinseltown. Once on a trip to Carmel, mother and daughter sat on the beach. A crying Joan took Christina’s hands in hers and told her of her lonely childhood, her hopes and heartaches. Too young to understand, Christina simply said, “I love you, Mommie dearest.” Joan smiled and gave the confused child a hug. “I’ve wondered sometimes if I hadn’t been just seven years old and I’d really understood all the things she said to me that night,” Christina writes. “I’ve wondered many times if my life with her would have been any different.”

No Wire Hangers

“There are plenty of people who have thought me too loving, others have criticized me for being too severe. They’ve warned me that a child thinks anyone who disciplines them is agin ‘em,” Joan writes in A Portrait of Joan. “In my opinion, you have to give a child a line to follow, show him you love him but make him follow it. Discipline is part of a child’s security.”

According to Christina, “discipline” was an understatement. Mommie Dearest is an exhausting, raw, terrifying read, quite different from the campy horror of the 1981 movie version starring Faye Dunaway. Christina claims that her life was as regimented as the Army, with endless chores, frequent beatings with hairbrushes, and the terrifying prospect of being locked in a closet. The household catered to Joan’s impossible demands, the children silently playing cops and robbers on the lawn so as not to disturb their mother, who manically took three or four showers a day and invited a series of violent “uncles” into the family home.

Her punishments were twisted and psychologically damaging. When Christina ripped the wallpaper in her bedroom, Joan shredded her favorite dress and forced her to wear it for a week. When she was asked why she was being punished, Christina was supposed to respond, “I don’t know how to take care of pretty things.”

According to Christina, the night raids were the most terrifying of all. One night, Christina and Christopher awoke to the sounds of her mother destroying her closet, and ripping Christina out of her bed:

Shaking me by the hair of my head she screamed in my ear, “No wire hangers! No wire hangers!” With one hand she pulled me by the hair and with the other she cuffed my ears until they rang and I could hardly hear her screaming …When she had totally destroyed my entire part of the bedroom she stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, “Clean up your mess,” she growled turning on her heel.

Another night, Christina alleges that Joan beat her with a can of Bon Ami after she failed to clean her mother’s bathroom properly. Sobbing, Christina spent hours attempting to clean the white powder from the bathroom and herself. “I was only nine years old,” she writes, “and I truly wished that the earth would open and just swallow me up and take me out of this eternal misery and punishment.”

Cinderella 2.0

After Joan Crawford won the Oscar for her role in Mildred Pierce in 1945, her hard-won career began a slow, steady decline. “She was just doing battle with the world. She was fighting for her life,” Christina writes, “and it took a heavy toll on all of us.”

Christina—headstrong, intelligent, and increasingly fighting back—was sent to Chadwick, a boarding school in Palos Verdes. She alleges that Joan perversely claimed she was unable to pay tuition, forcing her daughter into becoming a working student like she had been. A drunk Joan would badger the headmistress, insisting on hearing of any transgressions so she could be punished. It got so bad that Christina says the kindly owners of the school attempted to take custody of her when Joan threatened to pull her out of the school.

For Joan, Christina and Christopher were now bad seeds she practically banished from her life. “We made a fatal error: we started growing up. We started becoming people,” Christina writes. “We were no longer the perfectly manipulated, camera-ready puppets … Mommie dearest became enraged when she perceived that all was not well in mannequin-land.”

However, standing up to Joan could have near fatal consequences. When Christina told her mother she had lied about being expelled, an enraged Joan allegedly began to beat, then choke her eldest daughter. “I completely forgot that she was my mother,” Christina writes. “She was trying to kill me and if I had the strength I would try to kill her first.”

Christina claims she was saved when Joan’s secretary burst into the room. (The secretary, while admitting the argument got physical, denied that Crawford choked her daughter.) She was locked in a room, and later confronted by a juvenile officer, who acknowledged Joan had beaten her but threatened to take her to juvenile hall. “What kind of world was it that let her off scot-free and punished me for her insanity?” Christina writes searingly. “It was a crazy world. What power did she have that everyone believed her or at least acted like they did… I couldn’t believe this nightmare was happening to me.”

For Reasons Which Are Well Known to Them

“My children owe me nothing but love and respect,” Joan writes in A Portrait of Joan. “They have given me from the beginning a tremendous emotional experience I wouldn’t have missed for the world. I hope only that they will walk in happiness and dignity.”

After years virtually shut away in a convent school, Christina attempted to find her happiness by becoming an actress like her mother. But she loses the reader in the last third of Mommie Dearest, with her constant complaints about her mother not giving her enough money while Joan swanned around the world with Pepsi-Cola Chairman Alfred Steele, her lionized fourth husband. While this treatment was no doubt infuriating to Christina, a lot of us have lived in crappy apartments.

And so it is that in their respective books, mother and daughter reveal themselves to be very much alike: clever, vindictive, stubborn, dramatic with a hard-edged, hard-won humor. Christina accuses her mother of blackballing her career and abandoning her troubled brother, Christopher, while Joan constantly compares Christina and Christopher to her beloved twins, writing:

I used to think environment obliterated heredity. I was wrong. Unlike Christina and Christopher, the twins don’t resent my life, they’re pliant, joyous, they link arms with me and off we march into whatever life may offer.

Joan and Christina would grow close for a time in the 1960s, only for things to start to fall apart again when Joan comically “filled in” for an ailing Christina on the soap opera The Secret Storm in 1968.

Whatever the truth of their relationship, the saga of Joan and Christina Crawford is terribly disturbing—and terribly sad. Since Mommie Dearest’s release, supporters of both women have taken sides in a battle over the book’s veracity. But what remains is a heartbreaking tale of generational trauma, abuse, fame, and a relationship that was never healed. (Crawford died in 1977.) “She had learned how to be a dancer, she had learned how to be an actress, she had learned how to be a star,” Christina writes of her mother in Mommie Dearest. “Maybe she just never had enough time left over to learn how to be a human being.”