When Christina dies...

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Christina was born on 6/11/39. She's 84 now and will be 85 this June 2024. I keep thinking that any day now, I'll see something in my Google Alerts that she's died---and I don't quite know what I'll think about that. In sympathetic moments, I think she was a weak, sad person---estranged from her mother---who saw a chance to make a buck when publishers offered her big money to write a tell-all. (And her then-husband David Koontz prodded her, gaining an undeserved "Executive Producer" credit for the subsequent movie based on the book.) In less-sympathetic moments, I think she was a jealous, vindictive, attention-seeker. Most of what appeared in MD had already appeared in the October 1960 Redbook article: The Revolt of Joan Crawford's Daughter. The MD book in 1978 was basically the same info, with a dramatic tree-chopping scene thrown in for publicity purposes, and the bathroom-cleanser scene switched from being a sloppy maid's re-do task to the poor daughter's. I'm also not that enamored with Christina's publicity-seeking tours that went on for DECADES after her mother's death, featuring multiple editions of MD and drag queens, etc.; all money-making ventures for CC, and good for cheap laughs in gay clubs, but... Somehow I think that a real person---Joan Crawford---got lost in Christina's latter-day hustle for a buck. No sense of more-intricate history, or of reality, between two people, mother and daughter. The publicity version became, in Christina's mind, the real version, which she subsequently hyped in public. (If you read the 1978 book, there's definitely a sense of loss there, and regret on Christina's part that her relations with her mother could not have been better. Christina allowed this honest feeling to be warped by the subsequent publicity. She changed from a sensitive person into a publicity-seeking hack.)

When Christina dies, I feel like I should post a "Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead" meme. And because of what Christina has done to Joan Crawford's reputation for no real reason, I think such a meme would be deserved. I hope I'll be better than that. But don't count on it.