Mommie Dearest

by Christina Crawford

  During the days, Chris and I would go off swimming and sometimes horseback riding. I was always crazy about horses and went riding every Saturday at home over in Will Rogers Park. I rode a beautiful palomino mare named Lady and I pretended she was really mine. Every night almost I would wish on the evening star … “Star light, star bright, bring me this wish I wish tonight.” What I always wished for was a horse of my own like Lady. I even devised elaborate schemes for how we could keep a horse in our own back yard. I would lie awake at night imagining the day when I got my very own horse.

  Mother would knit and read and take walks and sometimes play tennis. She would always have stacks of scripts and weeks of trade papers and the funnies. I don’t know when she had time to read the rest of the newspaper, but she always read the comic strips.

  After a few days, she’d be telling jokes and playing tricks on us. Little practical jokes that we never quite felt comfortable with, nor completely understood. Mother valued a sense of humor and insisted that we develop one … more often than not at our own expense. We learned to laugh at ourselves and to at least appreciate the irony, if not exactly the humor, in life’s most unexpected situations.

  Mother loved the walks and must have walked miles before we left Carmel each visit.

  One night she was a little restless and asked me to go for a walk with her. It was dark and we didn’t have a flashlight. But the sky was relatively clear and the moon was bright. I followed her across the lawns to the sea wall. We walked along the sea wall with only the sound of the waves pounding and the dampness of the sea spray for company. It was kind of a lonely place.

  We sat down on some flat rocks and looked out toward the open sea. We sat there in silence a long time. She took my hand and held it firmly. Very softly she started talking to me. I had to lean toward her to hear above the sound of the surf against the rocks. She looked so beautiful in the moonlight that I had a hard time listening to what she was saying. The wind blew her hair gently away from her face and her profile was illuminated by the moon and reflections from the clouds. She was talking to me about life, about herself and what she wanted and how hard it was to get … how hard it was to be happy. She said that I made her happy, but all of life wasn’t that easy. She told me how poor she’d been and how lonely as a child, how hard it had been for her. She said she just felt sometimes like she’d never catch up. She talked for a long time and I tried with all my might to understand what she was saying to me. But, some things I couldn’t understand. I was only about seven and I just didn’t know what she was talking about. So I held onto her hand with all my strength and concentrated on her face. I never took my eyes off her for an instant. I was trying so hard to understand … to help her. She started to cry. She said she wasn’t really sad, but that it was so beautiful here. I put my little arms around her neck, hugging and kissing her. I wished with all my heart that I could make it all right for her. “I love you mommie dearest” is all I could say. She turned and looked at me through her tears. She smiled at me. Then she ran her finger across my forehead, rumpled up my hair and gave me a hug. “Let’s go … it’s getting cold.”

  She held my hand the whole way back. At one point she stopped and looked down at me. “You don’t understand very much of what I said, do you?” In despair I shook my head no. She sighed as she said, “It’s all right, Tina … you’ll understand more when you’re a little older.”

  When we got back to the cottage she made us both hot chocolate and we sat in front of the fire until I fell asleep with my head in her lap.

  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 … I’ve wondered many times if my life with her would have been any different.

  Mother had finally started working again, doing a movie for Jerry Wald called Mildred Pierce. It was the first real picture she’d done for Warner’s under her new contract and she was very nervous. She left for the studio about 5 a.m. while it was still dark and she wouldn’t return until well after dinner. Sometimes she didn’t get home until after we were asleep. She worked on the picture six days a week and on Sunday she slept until almost noon. The afternoons were taken up with the hairdresser, the manicurist and finally the masseuse who came to the house in succession to prepare mother for the coming weeks work. We rarely saw her during those days, but since we had a nice nurse at the time, our life went fairly smoothly.

  Mother was so glad to be working again in a good film with a really good part that she hardly had time to think about anything else. She hadn’t worked in over two years and what with the war and rationing, most of our house had been closed up, the furniture covered and the doors closed to any rooms not necessary for everyday life. Those were the days of no extra servants and she did do a lot of the housework. For a while even our big kitchen was closed down and we cooked over sterno in the basement. We had to help in any way we could, but we were too young to be of much real use. Our entire front lawn was turned into a victory garden to grow vegetables and after our Japanese gardener was taken off to the relocation camp quite suddenly, we had to tend it ourselves.

  But now, in 1945, even though the house seemed a lot emptier without Mr. Terry, life seemed to be going better for mother.

  Unfortunately, the picture couldn’t last indefinitely and the day eventually came when it was totally finished. All the publicity pictures had been taken, all the dubbing and trailers finished and mother’s dressing room cleaned up. Since she had a permanent dressing room in a bungalow on the Warner’s lot, she didn’t have to bring everything home. But she did remove anything of real value to her and brought it home in several trips. Then there was nothing more to go back to the studio for and she had to face finding another picture to do even though she was under contract and still getting paid.

  When mother was home, our lives changed drastically. I was in second grade at Gretna Green public school and left every morning long before she got up. That year I took the bus to school and back so there wasn’t much of a problem for me. Jenny, the cook, would get me up and I’d get dressed while my little brother still slept. Then it was downstairs to eat breakfast and off to school I went with my lunch box. When I came home, mother was often gone and I’d go out to play with my brother. Mother came home in the afternoon and usually had friends over for dinner or went out with someone.

  At first it was only the weekends that were difficult. Then we lived according to a rigid and unchanging schedule. We got up everyday at the same time whether it was Monday or Saturday. We ate breakfast at the same time and did the dishes and made our beds at the same time every day. The older we got, the more inflexible the schedule became.

  Since our lives were scheduled like the army, it will not be a surprise to know that we had a half-hour to eat each meal. We had another half-hour to wash the dishes. We were not allowed in the kitchen except to get things necessary to set the table. The cook was a crucial factor in my life. If we happened to have a cook who not only had some talent but also some compassion, I fared rather well. If not … my life was made miserable. There weren’t many things I absolutely hated, thank God, but there was one: blood-rare meat. (The other was black bean soup.)

  During the war, meat was scarce and mother used to buy it on the black market and loose no time telling us how expensive it was and how lucky we were … to think of the “starving children in Europe” … and eat every single scrap of food on our plates. This was no idle threat either, nothing easy like no dessert if we failed to head the warning.

  The punishment for not eating was progressive, and I do not mean in the sense of being enlightened. I mean it had a number of phases to it. First, if I hadn’t finished the quivering piece of reddish-blue steak in the allotted time, I indeed received no dessert. I didn’t really care about that part very much. When it was evident that we were going to have beef of any kind for dinner, I would beg the cook for an end piece, if it was a roast, or to cook my piece of meat a little lo
nger. All this was done in whispers, of course, so the nurse couldn’t hear me. Mother usually wasn’t there and we almost never ate meals with her during the week and only lunch on weekends, but everyone had orders to report any infringement of any of the rules to her. If there were no broken rules reported for more than a few days, mother figured someone was holding out and the household inquisition began. Most of the time, I guess it was less hassle for the people who worked there to just follow the rules, even if they didn’t agree with them.

  Anyway, sometimes my pleading went for naught and I ended up with this blood-rare food. Mother had some idea that at those prices, raw was more nutritious for us.

  At the beginning of the meal, I would try to eat the meat in teeny bites covered up with whatever else was on the plate, hidden under mashed potatoes or carrots or anything. I wasn’t allowed to drink my milk with my food (another one of those stupid rules) so I couldn’t just put a little piece in my mouth and wash it down. Well, try as I might, the food never came out even. I would have eaten all the edges of the meat which were slightly cooked and be left staring at the blood-rare center. I couldn’t swallow those pieces because every time I tried to I gagged.

  So … my dinner plate was removed to the refrigerator to await breakfast. In the morning, I got a glass of milk and this cold plate which by now was greasy and yucky. I also was not allowed to sit down at the table, but had to stand for the half-hour. I did drink my milk and that was all.

  Very well … back to the refrigerator with my plate. Lunch progressed the same.

  So far, since yesterday I’d had two glasses of milk and a lot of water. I could hear my stomach gurgle and I didn’t feel very good. I didn’t think it was funny or cute and I wasn’t trying to be impossible. I wished I could have sent all of my portion of the meat to those starving children for the duration of the war. But the war was over and I absolutely could not understand why, if meat was still so expensive and I hated is so much, why did I have to eat it?

  For dinner I had the same plate cold from the refrigerator but I was not allowed at the table. I had to stand and stare at this horrible grungy plate placed on top of the chest type freezer on the back porch. I guess my plate was becoming an unpleasant sight for the rest of the table. I tried to eat a couple pieces of the wretched meat and ended up vomiting in the servants’ toilet.

  The next morning I didn’t even want to get up. I knew that awful plate was down in the refrigerator waiting for me. And the worst of it was that now I was really getting hungry. Three glasses of milk were not enough to keep a nine year old going for very long. I was unhappy and had begun thinking of ways to hide pieces of the meat so that it would look like I was eating it. But there was no place to hide it and the dog was not allowed near us during meals.

  Breakfast smelled delicious … bacon and eggs were cooking and the aroma reached up to my bedroom. My stomach was not gurgling now, it was growling. I went downstairs thinking that the ordeal just might be over … after all I was just a kid and it was two full days now. I set the table with a place for myself as usual. There were three of us at the table: the nurse, Chris and myself. The twins were in highchairs. When the nurse came downstairs, she told me I would not be allowed breakfast until I finished my plate at the freezer. I couldn’t believe it.

  I marched myself out to the freezer and there it was … the same plate from two days ago.

  How I hated the sight of it. I felt so helpless … why did everybody hate me so much? It’s so unfair. What did I do that was so bad? I hate bloody meat … so what? Everybody hates something. Even mother … she told me so. When she was a little girl she took a big helping of mashed potatoes. Her mother told her if she took that much she’d have to eat it. Mother laughed and said she’d be happy to. It turned out to be mashed turnips! She hated mashed turnips, but her mother made her eat every mouthful.

  I looked down at my plate and cried. I just stood there alone on the back porch looking at that disgusting plate with the congealed grease and the piece of meat that had started getting shriveled and icky … like moldy … and I cried.

  I didn’t eat another mouthful of it. I just stood there getting madder by the minute, smelling the bacon and eggs for everyone else. When my half-hour was up I marched in without a word, put the plate in the refrigerator and did the dishes. I’d been doing dishes since I was four years old and had to stand on a step stool to reach the sink. For some weird reason it pleased mother to tell people that I’d been doing dishes since I was four.

  Someone called mother to tell her that I wouldn’t eat and I had to talk to her at the studio that afternoon. She yelled at me for being a selfish, ungrateful child … how could I be so ungrateful with all the starving children in Europe. Didn’t I realize how hard she worked to pay for all the things we had … how much better off we were than other children … I was to go to bed early without any dinner and she’d take care of the spanking tomorrow. She hung up without saying goodbye.

  I lay in my bed crying. I wasn’t even hungry anymore. I don’t understand why she gets so mad at me … why everything I do seems to make her angry. I thought about the starving children in Europe. I thought about running away from home … but I had nowhere to go.

  On Saturday mornings from the time we got up, through breakfast, all our regular chores and even when we went out into the back yard to play, we were never allowed to speak above a whisper. The nurse had to whisper and the rest of the servants had to whisper. The entire household had to whisper until mother was ready to get up. Whispering inside the house was difficult at best, but whispering way out in the back yard past the pool was impossible. It was very hard to think up games that didn’t require any communication. The easiest was “hide and seek” but a silent version of cowboys and Indians came in second. It must have been quite funny for the nurse to watch us “galloping” around the yard with our toy six-shooters, whispering “bang, bang” and the victim falling to the ground silently. Badminton was also easy to play without any noise but we didn’t really have enough people. In the summertime we could go swimming, but we were forbidden to dive or splash or make any noise. So Chris and I became adept at underwater swimming and played all our games under the surface. We even learned to talk to each other under water which was hilarious.

  If the weather was bad and we had to stay indoors, whispering was a torture because we weren’t allowed to play the radio or any of our other records.

  In addition to whispering inside the house, we also had to walk on tip toes. It may sound ludicrous now, but it wasn’t in the least bit funny then. The whole house whispered and walked on tip toe until mother decided to get up. More often than not she arose around 11:30 just before lunch. If we were out in the yard we could see the Venetian blinds on her bedroom windows open and that was the signal that she was up. Usually she would call out to us and say good morning. But even if she didn’t, we would know that the open blinds meant that she was up. Then we would go into the house to check and make sure that the cook had received the call for her breakfast. If she had, it was safe to talk in a normal tone of voice. If she hadn’t, it was still whispers. And if she didn’t get up before our regular lunchtime, we had to continue to whisper through that meal as well. This was not a special occasion procedure, it was not connected in mother’s mind to any kind of punishment. It was standard operating procedure, one of the many house rules and it was fully enforced all the years I lived in that house. It was her house to be run entirely on her orders, for her personal convenience. No one else had a bit of say in what went on or how things were to be done. Since she paid all the bills, she pointed out to us that it was her privilege to have things done exactly as she wanted them and that was that. There was never any further discussion on that or any other subject once she’d given her opinion. And about the whispering, she was adamant. If, woe be unto us, we ever made a sound that should have the awful misfortune to be blamed for waking her before she was ready to arise, the entire house heard her wrath. If we were o
utside playing, those Venetian blinds would fly open, the window shoved up and her voice bellowed across the garden.

  “Goddammit … how many times do I have to tell you to keep your voices down?!” At this point, all movement would come to a screeching halt in the yard. The nurse, Chris and I would literally freeze in our places. “Christina, you come in this house this instant.” With that, the bedroom window would slam shut. Slowly I trod toward the house, knowing that one of those vile spankings that hurt for days was in store for me. Mommie was always in a terrible mood if anyone accidentally woke her up and the spankings for this infringement of the rules tended to convey the full force of her anger. She had already broken several hairbrushes across my bottom. It really was a wonder that I hadn’t developed calluses on both cheeks by this time. But unfortunately I had no such luck and the spankings often left large painful blisters and always the long red welts would be visible for days.

  In the fortuitous event that nothing prematurely roused our mother from her bed, one of us would usually take her breakfast tray upstairs to her dressing table. Many mornings when I arrived to set the tray carefully on the glasstop table, mother was across the room at the sink washing her face in ice water and then taking her two Bufferin. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I understood the significance of the Bufferin. No one looks terrific when they first get up, but my mother looked about as far away from being a movie star at this time of day as anyone could possibly imagine. Even in the summertime she wore white pajamas that were tailored like men’s pajamas. She had dozens of sets of them exactly alike except that they had different colored piping around the edges and matching monograms. Under the pajama top she wore a white tee-shirt and on her feet she wore white socks. Sometimes she even wore white gloves to keep the cream on her hands during the night. She had short red hair which she kept away from the cream on her face with an elasticized head band. When she first got up her hair somehow was always standing straight up looking rather like a firecracker explosion. To top off this outfit, she had her face tied up with something called a “chin strap”. Before she had breakfast she unraveled all this paraphernalia and put on a robe. I would stay a minute or two and then scurry down to lunch.