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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

“They were raised as twins. She (Joan Crawford) called them twins,” Christina Crawford reportedly said. “Her career needed a boost, and one child alone wasn’t going to get her the ...

“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 ...

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 ...

The ghost of Joan Crawford haunts HBO’s remake of “Mildred ... upon a self-sacrificing mother by a pathologically ungrateful child. As Haynes says, it’s “an unrequited love story.” ...