http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2282148,00.html
Elizabeth Day
Sunday May 25, 2008
The Observer
One of the first children to be adopted by a Hollywood star has condemned the trend for celebrity adoptions as a publicity-seeking exercise with ‘profound medical and psychological effects’. Christina Crawford, 68, who was adopted by the actress Joan Crawford in 1939 when she was just two months old, said the recent spate of high-profile adoptions gave her ‘tremendous concerns’.
Crawford claims she was physically abused by her adoptive mother. In 1978 she wrote the bestselling memoir Mommie Dearest about her experiences. It was later adapted into a film starring Faye Dunaway and Crawford went on to become an influential advocate for adoptees’ rights.
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‘I have tremendous concerns about celebrity adoptions by people like Madonna and Angelina Jolie,’ she said in an exclusive interview to mark the publication of a 30th anniversary edition of her memoir. ‘From the adoptee’s point of view, it is vitally important to know who they are, where they came from, or it can have profound medical and psychological effects.’
Madonna’s high-profile adoption of a baby boy, David Banda, in 2006 was back in the headlines last week when she presented her documentary about the effects of disease and poverty on Malawi at the Cannes Film Festival.
Angelina Jolie, who is pregnant with twins, has three adopted children: Maddox, a six-year-old orphan from Cambodia; Pax, a four-year-old Vietnamese boy abandoned at birth; and an Ethiopian orphan, Zahara, who is three.
Crawford alleges that her mother, who was one of the biggest film stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, adopted her four children for publicity purposes, although many of her recollections are disputed by her adopted younger sister. While their supposedly happy family life was detailed in lengthy magazine spreads, Crawford claims that behind closed doors her mother was an abusive alcoholic given to unpredictable bouts of rage.
One of the most infamous scenes in the book and the subsequent film depicted Joan Crawford launching into a tirade after discovering that Christina had hung clothes on wire hangers. ‘No wire hangers!’ entered the vernacular as shorthand for maternal instability.
Crawford said: ‘It was complete and total hypocrisy between the public and the private. She adopted us for the publicity.’ When asked if today’s celebrities are driven by the same motivation, she replied: ‘What do you think? Why are they so keen on getting the maximum newspaper and magazine coverage?’
Crawford was informed by Joan Crawford that her biological mother had died in childbirth, but discovered while researching her family history in the early Nineties that both her parents had been alive at the time. Her mother, a student, and her father, an engineer who had been married to someone else, both died before she could trace them. Joan Crawford died in 1977.
David Holmes, chief executive of the British Association for Adoption and Fostering, said: ‘I certainly agree that children aren’t accessories, but I also think it’s quite a sweeping generalisation. Just because someone is a celebrity doesn’t mean they couldn’t be a good parent. People adopt for lots of reasons, but the prime motivation is wanting to give a safe and secure home to a child.’