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Some quotes from "Attack of the Monster Movie Makers" (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. 1994). Being interviewed is one Herman Cohen:

Interviewer: Today Joan Crawford has the off-screen reputation that she does because of Mommie Dearest, the book and the movie. What kind of lady did you find her to be?
Fascinating. Exciting. In spite of her sipping hundred-proof vodka, she was very professional with me, and would never take a drink unless I okayed it. She always knew her lines and she was always on time. She would come in very early in the morning, like six-thirty, and she loved to cook: She made breakfast for her hairdresser, for her costumer, for "her team." She was strongwilled, she was tough-but, tough as she was, at the drop of a hat, she could be reduced to tears.

Interviewer: For her age, she looks great in BERSERK.
Doesn't she? And doesn't she look great in the leotard? Edith Head designed that leotard for her as a favor.

Interviewer: Crawford's biographies say she was a lonely lady during this period.
Oh, yes, Joan was a very lonely lady, but we became very close friends, from the time of BERSERK until she died. We went out a lot, in London and New York and here in L.A., in the years after I met her on BERSERK.

She was taught everything at MGM, and one thing that she was taught there was that the producer is the boss. She always went to the producer if she had any problems, with the director or with any member of the cast or crew. As an example, one morning she called me, about two o'clock a.m.-woke me up out of a sound sleep-asking, "Herm, you have your script with you?" As if I go to bed with my script [laughs]! She said, "Go get your script! I'm working on tomorrow's scenes and you're sleeping!" I got the script, and she started in, "Now, on page blah, blah, blah," and she wanted to talk about it because, as I said, she was lonely. She would stay up late at night, sipping her vodka, going over her lines for the next day.

Then she said to me, "What time are you leaving for the studio tomorrow morning?"-we were shooting at Shepperton at the time. "Look, why don't you leave around five-thirty and pick me up?" I said, "Well, what's wrong with your car?" "Oh, there's something wrong with the car," she said. That was all b.s. It turned out that one of our prop men had to have all his teeth extracted, and she sent her Rolls-Royce over to pick him up-take him to the dentist-wait for him-and take him home. Then she had it go to a Jewish restaurant in Soho called Isow's, where a lot of members of the industry would always go, and pick him up some chicken soup and bring it to his house! That's why she didn't have a car that day! So I had to call my driver, wake him up, and have him pick her up at five-thirty in the morning. She didn't tell me until after all this happened-in fact, it was the prop man who told me what Joan had done. But she was always doing this kind of stuff-

Interviewer: None of which you'll find in Mommie Dearest.
Right. Christina [Crawford] doesn't mention the nice things that Joan always did, especially for the crew. She was always very close to the crew, and knew all of them by their first names. When we were doing BERSERK, Christina married Harvey Medlinsky, who was a director, and Joan gave Christina a check for five thousand dollars, told her to enjoy herself-I was right there at the time. And she gave her a big dinner party at Les Ambassadeurs, which was the restaurant club in London. None of this is covered in Mommie Dearest. (Harvey was married to Christina for about six years, and he said he never heard Christina tell one of these awful stories. It was her second husband who got her to write this book-they were broke and needed the money and what have you.) Joan ended up leaving Christina and [Joan's] son Chris out of her will, and that was a big mistake. Her attorneys should have advised her to leave them, say one thousand dollars, so they could not contest the will. (They both contested the will.) She was closer to her twins, the two girls, than she was to Christina or Chris. Joan had a lot of problems with Chris.

http://www.hermancohen.com/interviews/interview-attack6.html

More on "Mommie Dearest" from Danny Miller's blog, "Jew Eat Yet?":

When Christina Crawford’s tell-all book came out a year after her adoptive mother’s death, Old Hollywood divided into two camps: those who thought the book represented the slanderous ravings of a spoiled brat bent on revenge for being written out of her mother’s will; and those who said they had witnessed Crawford’s unstable behavior with her children and were convinced that the book’s shocking claims were true. At the top of the list of Joan’s defenders was her old friend Myrna Loy who had known Crawford since she first arrived in Hollywood in the 1920s and had appeared with daughter Christina in a stage production of "Barefoot in the Park. Loy thought Christina was an obnoxious child and that she had behaved horribly during the run of their play. She said that while she never saw Joan hit her daughter, if anyone needed a good slap it was Christina. Oy.

Helen Hayes, whom Joan had befriended in the 1930s, did not exactly elect Joan Mother of the Year in her autobiography:

Joan was not quite rational in her raising of children. You might say she was strict or stern. But cruel is probably the right word.

When my young son Jim came to stay with me, we would go out to lunch with Joan and her son Christopher. Joan would snap, "Christopher! whenever he tried to speak. He would bow his little head, completely cowed, and then he’d say, "Mommie dearest, may I speak? Joan’s children had to say [that] before she allowed them to utter another word. It would have been futile for me or anyone else to protest. Joan would only get angry and probably vent her rage on the kids.

On one of my Hollywood trips about this time, I ran into Dinah Shore in the hairdressing department of MGM. She beckoned me to come over, and then began talking in a whisper. "Helen, everybody knows that you’re Joan Crawford’s close friend. Can you do something about her treatment of those children? We’re all worried to death.

I said, "Look, you people out here see her all the time. Why can’t you say something? and Dinah said, "That’s the problem, we’re around her all the time, and I don’t think we could get away with it, but you come and go, Helen, so you could talk to her and then leave.

Well, I was frightened to do it. We were all afraid of Joan - which is the biggest problem in this kind of situation, as we’ve seen with fatal results. No one would speak up. I have read that people who are abused as children often become abusive parents. Maybe it was Joan’s tough childhood that made her exert her power like that over her own children. But understanding the reason did not make their suffering any easier to watch.

Pretty damning stuff, and yet there’s also evidence that Christina Crawford exaggerated some of the childhood episodes for dramatic purposes. With the passing of time, certain scenes that appalled me in the 80s didn’t seem so bad today. At Christmas time and on birthdays, Joan’s fans would send Christina tons of presents. Crawford would let her keep one or two and have her give the rest to needy children. This is presented in the film as monstrous but it seems quite reasonable to me today. Still, it’s clear that there were times when Crawford’s highly disciplined and controlling nature devolved into episodes of severe mental and physical abuse. The last thing I would ever do is accuse Christina Crawford of lying about her childhood. I would think that the only thing worse than experiencing such abuse is finally telling people about it and not being believed. Only she knows what happened between her and her mother and it certainly seems like Joan had plenty of undiagnosed disorders that made her a nightmare to live with. On the other hand, the filmmakers should have avoided the temptation to create completely fictional scenes of terror like the one in which Joan almost kills Christina in front of the magazine reporter. No matter how you pitch these bio films, most people are going to believe that real-life events happened exactly as depicted.

As far as Joan’s friends defending her, isn’t it true that you never really know what goes on behind someone else’s closed doors? Statistics would say that we all know or have come in contact with abusers even if we’ve never seen that side of them. I saw on the news yesterday the shocked reaction of the former neighbors of the guy who confessed this week to killing JonBenet Ramsay. "But he seemed so nice, I just don’t believe it!"

Still, Christina Crawford hasn’t helped her "case, in my opinion, by encouraging the camp-fest that has developed around the book and movie of "Mommie Dearest. She appears at screenings with drag queens playing her mother and at which the crowd interacts with the film à la Rocky Horror using props. Our audience the other night was more tame (for the most part-a few people brought wire hangers to the screening) but the uproarious laughter that greeted so much of the film made me very uncomfortable. If the story is "true, we are laughing at horrific child abuse. If it is an exaggerated tale of a troubled childhood, we are participating in a major defamation of character of a woman who is not here to defend herself and whose public image (the one thing everyone who knew Joan Crawford agrees she cared about more than anything) has been utterly trashed. For the record, Crawford’s adopted twin daughters, several years younger than Christina and Christopher, swear that the book and film are grossly inaccurate depictions of their mother but again, that doesn’t mean these things didn’t happen to Christina and her brother. Look at the different treatment of the children in Bing Crosby’s two families.

http://dannymiller.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/mommie_dearest_.html

My thoughts on "Mommie Dearest"...

Joan Crawford had a tough, difficult childhood. Making excuses? No, just stating a fact. She was, basically, on her own, with no one to turn to. She developed survival skills and she not only got through it, she thrived and became a successful, accomplished actress. Her toughness, her survival instincts, and her drive to succeed enabled her to overcome a disadvantaged beginning and rise to the top of her profession. She didn't succeed because she had love and emotional support from her mother; she succeeded in spite of the meager relationship there.
One can easily understand how, looking back over her own childhood, she could come to the conclusion that, it isn't the love you receive that helps you become successful, it is the discipline and the drive.
And so, the foundation for her child-rearing philophy was laid down.

Unfortunately, most of Joan Crawford's parenting mistakes were made when she was under the influence of alcohol.
Christina Crawford writes in "Mommie Dearest," that Joan had a definite drinking problem. How sad, that a person so disciplined and responsible, became a slave to alcohol, so much so that it marred her reputation and her relationships.

Did Christina Crawford have the right to publish "Mommie Dearest?"

In my opinion, yes, she did.
The assertion that Christina waited until Joan was gone to speak her mind, doesn't hold water; an article outlining their problems, "The Revolt of Joan Crawford's Daughter," was published a full 18 years before "Mommie Dearest," and detailed their estrangement.
Joan chose to do nothing to heal the gulf between them, and Joan even publicly branded her, and her brother Christopher, as guilty of some unnamed crime, before the whole world, with her "for reasons which are well known to them" comment in her will.
After enduring a lifetime of coldness and emotional abuse, it was the last straw.
I believe, had Joan not included that scathing comment, but simply disinherited her two eldest children, there would've been no "Mommie Dearest" book. But she took the opportunity to strike out against her two oldest children - and she paid the price. Christina wrote her book, and forever changed the perception of her mother in the public's mind.
She damaged her mother's public image in a sense; but those of us who recognize the complexity of people's characters, can still enjoy Joan Crawford as an actress, while conceding that her parenting skills were less than stellar.

Mrs. Mildred Pierce