“Mommie Dearest was not an accurate portrait of who Joan Crawford was as a person,” said the film historian Jeanine Basinger, who also knew Crawford. “How many people do you know about whom you can say, ‘This is a person I can count on one hundred percent'? If she was your friend, she was there.” Apart from the tale of the wire dress hangers in Christina’s book—the incident that perhaps determined Joan Crawford’s image for countless people forever after—Mommie Dearest often evoked shock without due cause.
