Old Hollywood star Joan Crawford was estranged from two ... but the adoption never materialized. Crawford's oldest child, Christina, alleged that her mother physically and emotionally abused ...

Joan's father left the family when she was a child, writes Spoto, and she was raised by her mother and stepfather Henry Cassin, who gave Crawford the nickname "Billie" and whom she believed was ...

"Joan Crawford: The Ultimate Movie Star," an enthralling ... Crawford "unfit" and declined her application to adopt a child, she turned to a "baby broker" in Las Vegas, adopting Christina and ...

Revisiting the original tell-all book about Joan Crawford ahead of Sunday’s newest ... over the course of her lifetime (her second child, a boy, was reclaimed by his birth mother within a ...

“When she was Joan Crawford, she was Joan Crawford and that ... “She was always this poor, abused, wretched child from San Antonio that no one wanted,” she says, going on to tell of the ...

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford both had storied careers ... He was married to Crawford at the time of his death. Crawford’s eldest child has questioned the validity of his cause of death.

“Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of ... Joan decided to adopt her own child—facilitated, Christina claims, by the gangster Meyer Lansky since adoption by a single woman was illegal ...

As for those child abuse charges ... (e.g., first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). In one of the last chapters, “Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography” offers some originality as Quirk ...

Joan Crawford was an icon of Hollywood's Golden Age, beloved until her death in 1977. But her daughter Christine's tell-all memoir of shocking child abuse, Mommie Dearest, threw the doors open on ...