Joan Crawford’s Children: All About Her Daughters and Son

Hollywood legend Joan Crawford had a complicated relationship with her children.

The Oscar winner was married four times, to Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Franchot Tone, Phillip Terry and Albert Steele. When her marriage to Tone ended, Crawford chose to adopt children, doing so as a single woman, which was illegal in California at the time, according to a 2010 retrospective on Crawford in The New Yorker.

She got around the law by adopting her oldest child, Christina, in Las Vegas in 1939, per The Guardian. She also adopted a boy in the early 1940s. That baby, now named D. Gary Deatherage, was reclaimed by his mother in an alleged attempt to extort money from Crawford, according to his 1991 memoir.

In 1943, Crawford and her then-husband, Terry, adopted another boy, naming him Phillip Terry, Jr.; upon their divorce, she changed the boy’s name to Christopher. In 1947, she adopted twin girls, Catherine “Cathy” and Cynthia “Cindy,” according to The Guardian. In 1950, Crawford announced to The New York Times that she intended to adopt a 5-year-old girl, but the adoption never materialized.

Crawford’s oldest child, Christina, alleged that her mother physically and emotionally abused her and Christopher in her 1978 tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest. (The book was ultimately told on-screen in the 1981 film of the same name.)

While Christina and Christopher were eventually both estranged from the actor, Crawford’s daughters, Cindy and Cathy, have told different, much more positive accounts of the family.

“[Christina] is her own person, and that person brought me a lot of pain,” Crawford said in 1976, according to an excerpt from the 2008 biography Not the Girl Next Door published in Vanity Fair. “I said this about Christopher and now I say it about Christina. The problem was I adopted her, but she didn’t adopt me.”

Here is everything to know about Joan Crawford’s four children.

Christina Crawford, 85

Christina was born on June 11, 1939, and was adopted by Crawford shortly after her birth. Because it was illegal for a single woman to adopt in California, the actress finalized the adoption in Nevada.

Crawford said she always encouraged Christina to follow in her footsteps. “She was literally wheeled onto the set of my pictures as an infant,” she told The New York Times in 1968. “She grew up surrounded by lights. I’ve introduced her to every actor and director I’ve ever worked with.”

As an adult, Christina became an actress herself, appearing in Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, the Elvis Presley movie Wild in the Country and the soap opera The Secret Storm.

In 1968, Christina suffered a medical emergency and had to have unplanned surgery for an ovarian tumor, leaving her role empty on The Secret Storm. In an unexpected turn of events, Crawford offered to step in and take over the role.

“I didn’t want them to give the part to someone else,” Crawford told The New York Times.

“They asked me about it the day after I was operated on,” Christina added. “It was coming to me in a fog, and I couldn’t exactly jump up and down in bed about it, but I do remember thinking that it was fantastic that she would care that much.”

In 1978, the year after Crawford’s death, Christina published Mommie Dearest, a memoir of her childhood that alleged child abuse and portrayed the star as an emotionally volatile alcoholic, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Christopher was born in 1943 and adopted by Crawford and Terry soon after. When Crawford and Terry divorced in 1946, she renamed her son originally known as Phillip Terry Jr. to Christopher Crawford.

He has not spoken publicly about his relationship with his mother, but Christina has often said that the siblings relied on each other as sources of strength.

“We made a fatal error: we started growing up. We started becoming people,” she wrote in Mommie Dearest (via Vanity Fair). “We were no longer the perfectly manipulated, camera-ready puppets … Mommie dearest became enraged when she perceived that all was not well in mannequin-land.”

In 1958, when he was 15, Christopher made headlines for shooting out street lights and school windows on Long Island with an air rifle; at the time, he was staying with child psychiatrist Dr. Earl Loomis, according to The New York Times.

Not much is known about Christopher’s personal life, but he served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Vietnam when he was 25, according to The New York Times. He lived a very private life, but Christina told The Guardian in 2019 that he was always supportive of her book and of her speaking out against their mother’s alleged treatment of them.

In Not the Girl Next Door, Crawford’s longtime friend John Springer revealed that when Christopher was discharged from the Army, he went to visit Crawford with his wife and child, but his mother turned him away.

In the book, Springer recalled Crawford saying, “I remember most clearly … when a teenaged Christopher spat in my face. He said, ‘I hate you.’ It’s pretty hard to overlook that. I couldn’t.”

In Crawford’s will, she stated that she deliberately disinherited both Christopher and Christina “for reasons which are known to them.” But after the actor’s 1977 death, the siblings challenged the will and ended up splitting $55,000, according to a 1979 article in The New York Times.

Christopher died in 2006 at age 63.

Cathy Crawford

Fraternal twins Cathy and Cindy were born on Jan. 13, 1947, in Tennessee. Crawford adopted them days later from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, which later became infamous for its black market adoptions. An investigation eventually led to statewide child welfare reforms in 1951.

According to Vanity Fair, the twins’ adoption had been arranged before their birth, and their birth mother died less than a week after they were born.

In 1968, Cathy wed Naval seaman Jerome LaLonde in a gown she designed and sewed herself, according to The New York Times. She had two children, Carla and Casey LaLonde. Cathy and LaLonde separated in 1984 and eventually divorced, according to Deadline. She reconnected with her biological family in Tennessee in the 1990s.

Of Christina’s allegations in the book, Cathy said, per Vanity Fair, “We lived in the same house as Christina, but we didn’t live in the same home, because she had her own reality. Cindy and I had a different reality — the opposite. I don’t know where she got her ideas. Our Mommie was the best mother anyone ever had.”

In 2008, while speaking to The Guardian, Christina responded to what Cathy had said. “Cathy has been very vocal about her experience, and that’s her privilege, but there was eight years’ difference between us,” she said. “She was two when I was sent to boarding school. She couldn’t have known anything about my or Chris’s experience — zip, nothing. She wasn’t there — she wasn’t even born when I was adopted.”

At one point, Cathy sued Christina for defamation for telling people while on tour that their mother lied about Cathy and Cindy being twins. Cathy won the suit in mediation, per The Hollywood Reporter.

In 2020, she died at 72 years old of lung cancer.

Cindy Crawford

Along with Cathy, Cindy was born on Jan. 13, 1947.

Just after the Mommie Dearest film release, Cindy told McCall’s, “My worst punishment was eating cold dinner for breakfast. Also, I never saw my mother drunk.”

In A&E’s Always the Star documentary, Cindy also said, “She was a disciplinarian. She wanted us to grow up independently.” Part of that discipline was doing chores, including washing dishes at age 4 or 5, she claimed.

“She wasn’t that kind of person that my sister Christina had said,” Cindy said. “She was very caring and loving.”

Cindy died in 2007 at age 60, per Vanity Fair.