Mar 28, 2008  |  By: JOEY DiGUGLIELMO  | COMMENTS     

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying “Mommie Dearest” is the first thing that pops into most people’s heads when they hear the name Joan Crawford.

Crawford’s memory has been on a strange rollercoaster ride since she died in 1977 at age 73.

Her life’s coda is well known. Oldest daughter Christina wrote a best-selling tell-all in 1978 called “Mommie Dearest” that was made into a movie in 1981.

The biopic was re-released on DVD in 2006 in a “Hollywood Royalty Edition” that features a healthy bounty of extras. Wisely, the disc was unabashedly marketed to gay men who revere the movie for its high (and unintended) camp quotient. It’s on a par with “Valley of the Dolls” in the camp echelon.

But the DVD and what would have been Crawford’s 100th birthday this week again raise questions that have never been authoritatively answered: How true are “Mommie Dearest’s” claims? Did Joan beat her kids?

The DVD claims that Faye Dunaway, who played Crawford in the film, refuses to speak about the movie. She was a no-show for the disc’s extras though she’s participated in similar featurettes for her hits “Network” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” But she doesn’t exactly fly into a rage (a la her performance) at the mere mention of it the way the DVD commentary by John Waters implies.

In the mid-’90s, Dunaway was a guest on Tom Snyder’s “Late Show” and a caller asked if she thought Christina’s allegations were true.

“You know, it’s one of those things where God is the only one who’ll ever really know what happened between those two,” Dunaway said.

Refreshingly, Dunaway goes into considerable detail discussing the movie in her 1995 autobiography, “Looking for Gatsby.” Though stills from “Mommie” showing her decked out in full Crawford regalia are noticeably absent from its photo pages, the book provides Dunaway a forum to settle some old scores.

She’s obviously proud of some aspects of the work but says director Frank Perry let her down by not reining her in. Whether you consider her performance fearlessly no-holds-barred or ludicrously over the top is another topic. Critics have been divided. Pauline Kael said scenery chewing was too subtle a phrase to describe the performance while Entertainment Weekly, in a retrospective appraisal, considered it one of Oscar’s most criminally overlooked turns.

But back to the real Crawford. Was she an abusive bitch or has she been unfairly maligned? I won’t pretend to be able to say authoritatively but having read much on the subject, I’d say the truth is, as one might guess, somewhere between the two extremes.

One of the problems with the books that have been written about Crawford since she died is that most try to peg her at one extreme or the other. In Jane Ellen Wayne’s sordid “Crawford’s Men,” (1988), Joan’s a bitchy, raging nympho; others, such as Fred Lawrence Guiles “Joan Crawford: the Last Word” (1995) and the new “Not the Girl Next Door” by Charlotte Chandler, go too easy on Crawford, glossing over or ignoring altogether unflattering biographical facts.

Crawford’s 1996 episode of A&E’s “Biography” is noble in its attempt to give her a fair shake. Hell, she deserves it after so many years of being trashed, but even a Crawford fan has to admit it goes too easy on her. Such black-and-white, good guy/bad guy characterizations simply ring false. Only in fairy tales are characters so easily categorized.

It was refreshing to see the late Cindy Crawford Jordan, another of Joan’s adopted daughters, interviewed for a change (she and twin sister Cathy Crawford LaLonde aren’t even mentioned in the movie).

“[Mother] never lost her cool in front of us,” Cindy told A&E. “I think sometimes she showed her frustration, but not in the cruelty that the book had mentioned.”

But the episode ignores Joan’s copious and well-documented drinking. She was probably a functioning alcoholic for much of the 1960s and early ’70s (and perhaps before), but another point that’s often neglected is that Crawford quit smoking and drinking completely a few years before she died.

Too little too late? Perhaps, but still a brave accomplishment.