The AFI Life Achievement Award, which Davis received in 1977—the first woman to receive it—provided a form of institutional recognition that the Oscar losses had not provided. The award was presented to Davis’s work as a whole, not to a single film, and in that sense it offered what the Best Actress Oscar for *Baby Jane* would have offered differently: a declaration that the accumulated body of work mattered, that the career added up to something.
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CHRISTINA CRAWFORD AND THE BIOGRAPHY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
The publication of *Mommie Dearest* in 1978—Christina Crawford’s memoir of her childhood with Joan Crawford—arrived fourteen months after her mother’s death and permanently altered the terms on which Crawford’s career and character were publicly understood.
Christina Crawford claimed in the book that her mother had been physically and emotionally abusive throughout her childhood: that she had been beaten with wire hangers, locked in closets, subjected to unpredictable rages, denied food and affection as punishment, and publicly humiliated on multiple occasions. The book described a woman who constructed a carefully managed public image of devoted motherhood while inflicting systematic cruelty on her children in private.
The book was a commercial sensation. It sold millions of copies and was adapted into a 1981 film directed by Frank Perry, with Faye Dunaway in the title role—a performance that has itself become a cultural artifact, capturing a particular register of operatic camp that has outlasted the film’s original reception.
The documentary record does not allow an independent verdict on the memoir’s accuracy. Crawford was dead and could not respond. Other members of the family disputed aspects of Christina Crawford’s account. Some friends and professional associates of Crawford’s expressed skepticism about the specific incidents described. None of this produces a reliable accounting of what occurred in Crawford’s home during Christina Crawford’s childhood.