Why ‘Mommie Dearest’ Took a Rocky Road to Becoming a Cult Classic

Anna Maria Italiano from the Bronx traveled almost as far to become Anne Bancroft as Lucille LeSueur did to become Joan Crawford.

When she was one month short of graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, a casting director gave her a role in Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring for the TV show Studio One. The following year she tested for a movie role at 20th Century Fox. Studio head Darryl Zanuck saw her screen test, said, “Sign that girl,” and presented her with a list of new last names. “They all sounded like I should have looked like Lana Turner, or been a stripper, all except Bancroft, which sounded dignified,” she remembered, then spent the fifties typecast as a film noir starlet in movies ranging from New York Confidential to Gorilla at Large to The Girl in Black Stockings.

The last straw came after a string of forgettable roles. “I began to realize you can’t wait for the gods to bless you with the right part,” said Bancroft. “Finally, I thought I’d help the gods help me. So I went to New York.”

Her solution was the sort of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” one that Joan Crawford herself would have appreciated. “What I did was, I fixed myself up so that I could do anything acting-wise,” she explained, “and finally, I could do anything. But remember, this came only after years of confusion and failure. Nobody takes you by the hand for this kind of move; you just take yourself. It’s very fundamental and personal. Finally, it was Arthur Penn who saw what was there. But, really, my whole career has developed backward.”

Penn directed Bancroft in the Broadway play The Miracle Worker and the follow-up movie version. Bancroft was superb and her performances in these, as well as in the earlier Penn-directed play Two for the Seesaw, proved to be her breakout roles. Ironically, it was Arthur Penn who gave Faye Dunaway her own cinematic break in Bonnie and Clyde a few years later, in 1967.

When Bancroft returned to Hollywood after five years to star in the movie version of The Miracle Worker, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. The ceremony was held on April 8, 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Bancroft first met Joan Crawford when the star famously offered to accept the award on behalf of any of the winning nominated actresses who were unable to attend the ceremony. Both Geraldine Page and Bancroft were performing in plays in New York at the time, and rather than jet back and forth between cities and risk missing a performance, Bancroft (like Page) opted to remain in New York. Besides, Bette Davis (Crawford’s rival and co-star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) was the front-runner and was expected to win, and Davis herself was at the ceremony ready to collect what would have been her third Oscar.

Nonetheless, Bancroft was named the winner, and Crawford swept onstage to collect the award, enjoying the attention. At the podium she announced, “Miss Bancroft said, ‘Here’s my little speech, dear Joan: There are three reasons why I deserve this award: Arthur Penn, Bill Gibson, Fred Coe.’ Thank you.”

Bancroft watched the ceremony on television at home in New York. “I cried and I laughed and I shouted and the doorbell started to ring and the wire services were on the phone,” she remembered. “There were photographers parked across the street. I never thought I’d win. I didn’t think I had a chance.” A few weeks later, Joan flew back to New York and, following a performance of Mother Courage and Her Children at the Royale Theatre, presented the award to Anne onstage while photographers snapped the occasion.

“It’s finally all set,” gossip columnist Marilyn Beck announced in her syndicated newspaper column in November 1979. “Anne Bancroft will bring the late Joan Crawford to life in Frank Yablans’s big-screen translation of the sad and sorry Mommie Dearest penned by Christina Crawford.”

In fact, Bancroft had a special connection to Crawford. “Joan Crawford,” she said, “you could walk up to, and even Katharine Hepburn—if you were an actress—her you could approach. Crawford fascinated me at one point, and I got to know her.” That knowledge convinced Bancroft she should play Crawford.

Bancroft had been discussing the controversial project with Yablans for over a year but would not commit herself to it until she saw a script she liked—and was sure the film would be directed by someone of whom she approved. When it was announced that Yablans had signed Franco Zeffirelli to direct, Bancroft’s commitment followed. Production at the time featured a screenplay by James Kirkwood, and filming was slated for the following spring.

Spring came and went. Columnists speculated Bancroft was getting cold feet at the notion of portraying a beloved film icon in a negative light.

“Aren’t you afraid people will hate you for playing Joan Crawford?” her husband, comedy director Mel Brooks, asked her.

“Did they hate ‘Mrs. Robinson’?” Bancroft responded.

Moviegoers probably best remember Bancroft as the seductive Mrs. Robinson in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. “I never dug deeper in my life,” Bancroft recalled, explaining not only how she connected with that part but how she might possibly have connected with the role of Joan Crawford. “It was so educational. I had conceived her as a less calculating woman. But Mike’s theory about it was very clear: all grown-ups were bad and all kids were wonderful. I didn’t see it, but we rehearsed for two weeks and gradually that side of her character emerged. Then I began to see in myself the coldness. Acting is so instructive; I can now become calculating when I need to. If someone isn’t nice, I know how to be not nice back. Before I didn’t know that side of myself.”

That underlying aspect of her own personality, on some level, initially attracted Bancroft to Mommie Dearest.

“Producer Frank Yablans is suddenly back to square one with his screen adaptation of Mommie Dearest,” gossip maven Marilyn Beck announced in her column in the spring of 1980. “Production on the controversial project was to have started this spring with Anne Bancroft playing that sorry Mommie, Joan Crawford. But now Yablans says that director Franco Zeffirelli is out and ‘all that I can tell you about Anne’s involvement at this point is that I think she’s still in.’”

Beck continued, “At the moment, Yablans is working on the script himself, with help, he says, from Anne Bancroft. But he reveals he can’t be sure when that task will be completed, when a new director will be hired—or if Anne will even be his ‘Dearest’ star.”

While in Anne Bancroft’s view Zeffirelli’s departure didn’t bode well for the production, her interest further deteriorated for other reasons.

“Along came Mommie Dearest,” began legendary comedy writer and raconteur Bruce Vilanch. It was a sunshiny day. He was seated at lunch, in a storytelling mood, and had great stories to tell.

“This is what I know: Anne Bancroft was going to do the picture, and Paramount ran a trade ad with a picture of Anne, the Joan Crawford portrait in the frame, which they subsequently used with Faye [on the poster]. And they were ready to go with the movie.

“And the day the picture appeared in the trades, as I understand it, Anne Bancroft went to her husband Mel Brooks, who is a friend of mine, and asked, ‘Do I look like Joan Crawford?’ And he said, ‘You look like a woman in the home who thinks she looks like Joan Crawford and has dressed up to look like Joan Crawford.’ And she said, ‘Should I not do this picture?’ And he said, ‘Look, we’ve all read the book. It’s one thing to picture Joan Crawford chopping down a tree in the backyard. It’s something else when you actually put on the makeup and the costume and do it. The audience’s reaction will be laughter because it won’t sync with their view of who it is, and it’s such an over-the-top conceit.’ So she quit, she backed out of it. I wasn’t in the room with Anne Bancroft when Mel said that, but he has repeated it to me and he’s not alone in that opinion. That alone makes him a genius, the fact he had that observation before anybody else did.”

Frank Yablans often held his business meetings on the 20th Century Fox lot. “Even though it was a Paramount movie, he was working on other films at Fox,” explained Tracie Hotchner.

She continued, “He had a highly unusual deal at the time which gave him two production offices with a secretary and elaborate offices at both studios, which I don’t think anybody has ever had. But that’s what he had.

“I wouldn’t presume to guess why Anne dropped out, but it was rather precipitous. And it became clear to me how uncomfortable she was in these meetings. They were meetings for her to give her input to the character and to the screenplay, which I was thrilled to be doing, and in my view, Frank felt displeased. The two bright, intelligent women were having a conversation in his office at 20th Century Fox. I felt he was wincing during this.

“So in the meetings with Anne, she and I got along wonderfully, which Yablans didn’t like, because we knew each other and we were from the same kind of New York intelligentsia background, kind of a literary, intellectual crowd. Which was not Frank’s crowd. So he was very harsh with me in the meetings where Anne would talk about what she envisioned for the character, based on my screenplay. She discussed the characterization, motivation, and character arc, as any well-trained, intelligent actress would. I was a trained actress myself, so I could talk the talk with Anne in those meetings, which was not actually Frank Yablans’s style. He was really obnoxious to me, which unfortunately could be his style socially if he felt threatened.

“He said later it was Mel who quote-unquote ‘would not allow’ her to play the part. That’s what Yablans’s feeling was, that the kibosh had been put on this by Mel, that he didn’t think it was good for her. I don’t know, but she was all set to play it, and I think she would have been phenomenal.”

Today Jonathan Zimbert and Ileen Maisel are two highly successful film producers, but four decades ago they started out as twenty- or twenty-one-year-old production assistants, freshly hired to work under Frank Yablans.

Zimbert remembered, “They were trying to get Anne Bancroft, and then they sort of succeeded, and my very first memory was a late-night script meeting in Frank Yablans’ office between the two Franks and Anne Bancroft, and it was quite late. Ileen and I were sitting in the outer office because we’re the assistants and we don’t go home until Frank goes home, or lets us know we can go home.

“So we’re there, and it was loud and it was contentious and ended with a hasty exit and no actress for the film. Bancroft was out, and then it wasn’t too long after that that Faye was in.”

As far as Frank Perry was concerned, Anne Bancroft presented even more problems for the production than Joan Crawford did throughout her career. “Bancroft kept us in limbo for fifteen months and nothing Frank Yablans, my co-producer, and I did would satisfy her,” Perry complained to Rex Reed. “We had no other choice but to get rid of her and hire Faye Dunaway. Faye wasn’t easy, either, but at least we got the movie made.”

That was what Perry said, but he left out some details.

“Frank Perry and [Anne Bancroft] didn’t get along either,” said Justin Bozung, Perry’s authorized biographer. “They had a history and in the late sixties had a falling-out.”

Bozung continued, “The Perrys and Bancroft were supposed to make a picture together. Bancroft had a production company in the late sixties. After Doc, the next picture Frank and Eleanor were going to make together was an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Expensive People, and they had even made a deal at Universal for it. Bancroft had owned the rights to the story and, long story short, basically Frank decided he didn’t want to make that, went behind Eleanor’s back and brokered a deal at Universal for himself and Joan Didion for Play It as It Lays, and left Eleanor out in the cold. It was all kind of during their divorce, so Eleanor really got the shaft on that and never got paid her $60,000 for writing the screenplay. Frank and Eleanor were in litigation for the next decade over this property, with Frank claiming he owned the rights, and Eleanor claiming she owned the rights, and there was money owed to Bancroft, and they had to go to court. It was a mess.

“I always wondered if, when Perry was signed on to direct, Bancroft saw that and said, ‘I’m outta here.’ I know there were a couple of press articles where Frank kind of skirts by the subject.

“When Anne left it was a little bit of a ‘Yikes!’ situation,” admitted Tracie Hotchner. The two Franks were now faced with a looming start date for their movie and no actress to play the lead.

And that’s when Faye Dunaway, in every sense, entered the picture. “She was the obvious alternative, and we were desperate,” Perry admitted. “We sent her the script and her reaction was quite the opposite of Anne’s. She had what I would call ‘appetite.’ She said, ‘When do we start?’”

It was 1980 and makeup artist Lee Harman was working with Faye Dunaway on the two-part television miniseries Evita Peron. One evening while he was driving through Hollywood, he heard on his car radio that Anne Bancroft was slated to play Joan Crawford in the big screen adaptation of Mommie Dearest. Harman instantly came up with an alternative idea: He thought Dunaway should play the part.

“First, I told her boyfriend, Terry O’Neill, that I thought she would be perfect for the role,” Harman recalled. Then, while making her up for the miniseries, he slowly convinced Dunaway herself.

“Eventually, I persuaded her—not knowing what was ahead.”

“Who told you that?” asked Tracie Hotchner, regarding Lee Harman’s claim that Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford was his idea. “Probably not. Sounds very self-serving. It’s possible. I mean, makeup artists—not being managers and agents and production heads and producers—are the ones who came up with casting ideas.

“I would say that sounds utterly self-serving and entirely unlikely. Did someone say, ‘Hey, how about Faye Dunaway?’ and someone else say, ‘Oh, I don’t see her as Joan Crawford,’ and the makeup guy said, ‘Wait, wait, let me show you!’ That’s my guess. There’s no way this was his idea and that he promoted her. Makeup artists are very low on the totem pole, even lower than screenwriters.”

Dorothy Faye Dunaway began life as an “army brat,” traveling as a child from Florida to Europe and back again, later studying Method acting under Bobby Lewis, Anna Sokolow, and Elia Kazan. “The bottom line on Method acting,” she stated, “is just that you experience the moment rather than indicate the moment.”

Following her breakout success in Bonnie and Clyde, Dunaway was given the “It Girl” treatment, with magazine layouts introducing her as a shining new star. Then her career stalled, and it looked like she was heading nowhere fast. She was cast in a string of movies failing to showcase her talents. Despite the prestige of the director’s or producer’s names, she was wasted in movies like Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement and Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno.

She had apparently already been given the nicknames “Fadin’ Away” (on the set of Bonnie and Clyde) and “Done Fade-Away” (by costar Steve McQueen on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair).

But fade she did not.

Lisi Tribble Russell became friendly with Dunaway beginning in the 1990s and remembered her saying, “Can you imagine what it takes to be thrust into your first major role with a young Warren Beatty and be determined under any circumstances not to let myself be seduced like all the other women? To make my way as a serious actress who wasn’t willing to trade on my looks? If I’m fierce, it’s because I had to learn to be.”

In 1970, Dunaway costarred with Stacy Keach in the revisionist Western Doc, directed by Frank Perry. She admired his earlier films David and Lisa and Diary of a Mad Housewife, written by his wife, Eleanor. But Doc was Frank Perry’s first movie without Eleanor.

It flopped.

According to an unnamed Paramount executive, “Well, here’s the deal with Frank Perry. Frank Perry was only a terrific director when he directed with his wife, Eleanor Perry, all right? I believe that’s the actual truth.

“With due respect to Frank Perry, may he rest in peace, when he and Eleanor Perry separated, I think he actually lost his mojo. And if you look at his résumé here, he actually absolutely did lose it.”

Then Justin Bozung dropped a (potential) little bombshell about Frank Perry: "He loved Faye.

“So, this was his process: when he made a film, he made a shortlist. Faye Dunaway never appeared on his lists until after he worked with her in Doc in 1970. But after that, she appeared on his shortlist every film after. Every time he made a film and was getting ready to cast, he’d always make lists of people. The first one was Faye Dunaway, the second one was Richard Thomas, and then Cliff Robertson. Those were his big three that he really admired and respected that he always put on his shortlist.

“He felt he understood Faye. And there’s speculation he was—his first wife Eleanor certainly thought—that he was in love with her during Doc. In their divorce decree, in Eleanor’s affidavit, she writes about how she thinks he is probably having an affair with her during the shooting of Doc.

“It’s pretty obvious he’s got a crush on her because after they finished Doc, to promote the film they went on The Dick Cavett Show together. I have a copy of this episode. So, in ’71 they go on Cavett together, he and Faye, and they walk out and they’re holding hands. And you can tell he’s just smitten with her. So, who knows, right?

“For being overweight, he really was the ladies’ man. He may or may not have been sleeping with Faye, but he was sleeping with Sue Mengers, and he had Eleanor, but he was already starting to date Barbara Goldsmith. He had a way with the ladies. It wouldn’t surprise me.”

Talent agent Freddie Fields discovered Dunaway and launched her as a star in the late sixties, but her career stalled in the early seventies. Because Fields was increasingly focused on production matters, superagent Sue Mengers (whose roster of A-list clients included Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman) inherited Dunaway by default around 1974. The two women never altogether meshed. Nonetheless, when Jane Fonda wavered on making Chinatown, Mengers pushed to get Dunaway the role. It remains a bona fide classic and offered what is arguably Faye Dunaway’s greatest critical success.

But many of the agency staff considered Dunaway a high-maintenance and problematic client. Joan Harris was Creative Management Associates’ special services administrator, a sort of interagency concierge attending to the executives’ and clients’ personal and professional needs, whether it involved securing theater tickets for agents or purchasing gifts for an A-list client’s birthday.

Harris remembered a time when Dunaway was planning a trip to New York and called to ask which exhibits were then running at the city’s local art museums. “I would be digging out the information for her,” said Harris, “and she would say, ‘Come on! Quick! Quick!’ I said, ‘Don’t you ever snap your fingers at me again. You are being so rude to me, Faye.’” Dunaway apologized and the following day made sure to call Harris, asking in a friendly tone, “Hi, sweetie—how are you?”

Sue Mengers quickly grew weary of dealing with Dunaway’s mercurial temperament. While earning raves for Chinatown, her behavior on the set of the made-for-television movie The Disappearance of Aimee was another story. Dunaway played real-life evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson while Bette Davis (no slouch when it came to temperamental behavior) portrayed her mother.

When she appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1988, Johnny Carson asked Davis, out of her previous costars, with whom she would never wish to work again. Out of a fifty-year career she replied without hesitation, “One million dollars, Faye Dunaway. Everybody you could put into this chair will tell you exactly the same thing. She’s just totally impossible.” (“It doesn’t help your reputation when Bette Davis, who was no drive through the wine country herself, goes on The Tonight Show and dumps on you,” observed comedy writer Bruce Vilanch.)

Singer Jill Sobule, then still a teenager, was an extra on the Denver, Colorado, set of The Disappearance of Aimee. “Faye Dunaway was hours late and we were all waiting for her, sweating through our costumes on the hottest day of the summer in an un-air-conditioned church,” she attested. “[When she] finally arrived, she was in the foulest mood and didn’t know her lines. She yelled at people and huffed off the set. It was like something out of Valley of the Dolls.”

Dunaway was passed around from agent to agent at the office and after Mengers and Joel Dean had a go at her career, Joan Hyler began handling Dunaway as a client. (Hyler was also Meryl Streep’s first agent.) “When Joan left ICM and went to William Morris, Faye left ICM,” explained Bruce Vilanch, Joan Hyler’s close friend.

He continued, “[Dunaway] married Peter Wolf, the lead from the J. Geils Band, so she was going through a heavy rock ’n’ roll period, and it was hard for her to get work. Part of the reason was, after she won the Oscar, she went for the money and she took a lot of lousy projects. And she wasn’t looking great, so it was tough. But Joan thought she was brilliant and was committed to her because she knew Faye could do it if she could pull her out.

“So she did. She got her Evita Peron, which was a very prestigious miniseries, a four-hour thing on NBC, and it was a big hit. When Joan moved out here [from New York to Los Angeles], we took a house together, so I got to hear all the stuff that was going on.

“And Faye called a lot. And it was a joke, because I would answer the phone and I would say, ‘It’s Faye.’ It was always about the gowns. Before she got Evita Peron, Joan put her on the Tony Awards as a presenter to show the world she was in good shape, and Faye was in great shape. But there was much conflama about the gown, what she would wear, who would pay for it. And there would be many calls. And she got Evita Peron and Joan called and said, ‘I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is, she got the part. The bad news is, forty gowns.’ She had a costume change in every scene, so there was a lot of drag, and it was all period drag from the late forties and fifties.

“It was just a running joke every time the phone rang, something else was wrong with one of the dresses. Nothing else concerned her. She had it, as far as figuring out who Eva Peron was. But the rest of it was all, like, crazy. Anyway, so after that, they were solid. And Faye got involved with Terry O’Neill, who was a London fashion photographer who had become a celebrity in his own right, and they opened a gallery in Santa Monica called Dunaway/O’Neill to show his work and other photographers . . . and they eventually adopted a child together.”

However it happened—whether it was Lee Harman’s idea, Terry O’Neill’s, or Faye Dunaway’s own—movie star Faye Dunaway decided she was going to play movie star Joan Crawford, and while she may regret having undertaken the role, at the time it all looked great on paper.

“They were ready to go with the movie,” continued Bruce Vilanch. “And Faye said Joan [Hyler] pushed her into it; she didn’t push her, but Faye stepped into it on a great deal. It was a back-end deal where she’d make money from first dollar on the movie. And the ad appeared again with Faye in it. It was a big bestseller and it was a prestigious project and she was an Oscar-winning actress. So it was kind of like, this is a comeback.”

“I never met Joan,” Faye Dunaway admitted. “I would like to have. I admire her.”

She continued, “Crawford was very disciplined. More than I am. Joan Crawford was a poor kid from the Midwest without much education. And then she became Joan Crawford. I think she created herself, perhaps to a greater degree than anyone else. She was the shopgirl who became a star . . .

“I think Crawford tried consciously to discipline the children. She was an intelligent woman who worried that her daughter could grow up vain, spoiled, and loose in a society like that. There is something to be said for proper behavior. And I think she never had a man to help her. She had one really good one—Al Steele—but he died just as they had reached the point of knowing who was who.”

Frank Yablans received word that Faye Dunaway wanted to do Mommie Dearest. She was shooting Evita Peron, and The Franks met with her to discuss her take on the role and see how she looked. They had a cordial lunch on set but remained skeptical, so they told her they would think about it. Later that day she called to ask Yablans to dinner with her beau, Terry O’Neill. Yablans countered by asking them to stop by his house for cocktails before they went to dinner. She agreed, and that was that.

Now comes the famous story, retold often, by everyone from Frank Yablans to Christina Crawford. One person who does not tell this story is Faye Dunaway, either in her memoir, Looking for Gatsby, written with Betsy Sharkey, or in any of the interviews she has given on the subject.

When the time came for Faye to arrive, the doorbell rang and Frank answered the door. There before him stood Joan Crawford. Or rather, Faye Dunaway dressed uncannily like Joan Crawford.

Yablans called Perry and invited him over to join them. Immediately. Perry arrived, was equally stunned by what he saw, and the rest is pop culture history. They were nearing the deadline to start production on the movie but were caught short without a star. Now another actress was more than eager to step in. It was a no-brainer: The Franks hired Faye Dunaway on the spot. It seemed like the perfect solution to all their problems.

Of course, their problems had only just begun.

Excerpted with permission from WITH LOVE, MOMMIE DEAREST copyright © 2024 by A. Ashley Hoff, published by Chicago Review Press.

A. Ashley Hoff is also the author of Match Game 101: A Backstage History of Match Game and My Huckleberry Friend: Holly Golightly and the Untold History of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He previously worked for talent agencies in Chicago and Los Angeles, and has written articles on Hollywood for The Advocate and Films in Review.