Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford

by Donald Spoto

Rockingham Academy, where she worked under even more unpleasant conditions than she had known at St. Agnes. The headmistress at Rockingham evidently believed that young girls were best disciplined by corporal punishment. “I was the only working student, and I had to take care of a fourteen-room house, cook, make beds and wash dishes for thirty other boys and girls. The headmistress was really a cruel tyrant, and there was so much work to do that no time remained for studying or learning. I don’t remember going to classes more than two or three times a year. But I do remember the broomstick applied to my legs or backside for reasons I don’t remember. I was a drudge there the way I was at home, and sometimes I had the feeling that the headmistress was just making an example of me—if the students did something bad, this was what would happen to them.” After