For the uninitiated, it is an adaptation of the schlocky and best-selling memoir of Christina, Joan’s adopted daughter, who lived under daily threat of violence from her film-star mother in their LA manse, and who has no reserve about portraying Crawford as a villain or a bogeywoman. It is not, when one thinks hard about it, very funny. To be a star, you also have to be a bit of a monster, which is why “the smear” resembles, variously, the scowl of a clown, the pout of a scheming drag queen, and the bloodied mouth of a bear in a wildlife photograph.įor those of us who did not grow up easily, and did not live with easy mothers-all those women at, in other words, the mercy of their own genetics- Mommie Dearest is a cautionary tale, in deep disguise as horror. If the Crawford mouth-a red, Fontana canvas slash of a maw-does not convey the image of a mother or a woman, it may be because Joan Crawford never wanted to be either: only a big, indelible star. Insensitive to any and all tenderness-and hypersensitive to imperfection-Faye-as-Joan is a perfect bitch and an absolutely flawless lunatic, which makes her as good at being an icon as it makes her awful at being a parent. Treating the mouth as the sum of the mother is obvious: it’s a mirror for the mother’s other mouth, and a possible site of tenderness. What Max Factor called “the smear” and the general public called “the hunter’s bow,” a casual observer might call “inhospitable” or “hostile.” The red of Crawford’s lips never seems like the red of a rose or a Valentine, but the red of a wound.

“The makeup job, of course, is the real star,” critic Stephen Schiff wrote for the Boston Phoenix about Mommie Dearest, which first screened in 1981, and starred Faye Dunaway in broad Joan Crawford drag: “a Frankenstein’s monster that hovers perilously between faces, between personas … There’s something biologically askew here: a makeup man could create that face, but human genes and chromosomes couldn’t.” I agree-I’d also guess that when he says “the makeup job,” he means the mouth, Joan Crawford’s outsized lips being more or less her genius loci. Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in a still from Mommie Dearest.

Mommie dearest novel