“She was not a maternal person,” according to Dorothy Manners, who inherited the Louella Parsons column. “It was not her instinct. Adopting those children was the thing to do. Joan was a kind person, but her blind spot was her children.” It seems, then, that there was indeed strict discipline in the Crawford home—but that it was neither as brutal nor as physical as Mommie Dearest claims. (By the time Christina was nine, she and Joan fought almost constantly: “I was probably not too pleasant a child,” she admitted.) Joan never offered excuses for disciplining
