Joan Crawford's Oldest Kids Didn't Initially Inherit A Cent Of Her Massive Fortune

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The following article discusses allegations of child abuse.

Over the course of an acting career that spanned almost 50 years, Joan Crawford built up a net worth of $2 million (over $11 million as of writing). However, out of Joan's four adopted children, only the younger two, twins Cathy Crawford and Cindy Crawford, were initially set to inherit any money. According to Joan's will, Cathy and Cindy were entitled to $77,500 each when they turned 50, with the intention that they would receive a smaller portion of money before then, and the rest would be kept in a trust and invested in the interim. Joan also bequeathed various sums to other individuals, with the rest to be divided among several charities. As for her older children, Joan chillingly stated in her will, "It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher [Crawford] or my daughter Christina [Crawford] for reasons which are well known to them" (via The Concluding Chapter of Crawford).

The document was dated October 1976. Joan died in May 1977. By 1978, Christina released her memoir "Mommie Dearest." With its allegations of child abuse, Christina's book was making waves even before it was released, and it unleashed one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the '70s. According to Charlotte Chandler's biography "Not the Girl Next Door," Joan believed Christina had been working on her book for a while. "I suppose she doesn't think that I'm going to leave her enough [money] or that I'm going to disappear soon enough," Joan said in a Vanity Fair excerpt from the biography. "I prefer to cut off people who want to hurt me, rather than to continue to give them power over me to go on inflicting pain."

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

There's a lot people don't know about Joan Crawford, and back in 1978, author Jane Kesner Ardmore asserted in the Los Angeles Times that by the time Joan died, she and her daughter Christina Crawford had been estranged for more than five years (via Newspapers). However, Joan's beef with her older kids went back further than that, since Christina claimed to The Guardian that Joan's attorney said she had apparently planned to cut them off financially since the 1960s. Joan was also estranged from her son, Christopher Crawford. According to "Not the Girl Next Door," one dealbreaker moment was when Christopher was a teen and reportedly spit on his mom during an angry confrontation.

Despite Joan's assertions of the memoir being a longstanding project, according to Christina, she started writing "Mommie Dearest" after her mother's death. Rather than a cash grab, it was a direct response to Joan's passive-aggressive remark in her will. Initially, Christina didn't even plan on making her story public. " ... I returned home after the funeral and decided to write a journal of my childhood, setting the record straight for my own benefit," Christina explained in 2017 (via Huffpost). Beyond the explosive impact of "Mommie Dearest" as a book, the story got even more notoriety when it was made into a movie with Faye Dunaway as Joan, an actor who looked just like the famous person she played.

While Cathy Crawford and Cindy Crawford refuted Christina's claims about Joan's abusive behavior, Christopher supported his sister's assertions. The two older siblings also successfully contested Joan's will, although they only got $27,500 each, a fraction of what the twins received.