Thirty years ago today – May 10, 1977 – the big story on most of the morning TV shows was the announcement that one of Hollywood’s most legendary movie stars, Joan Crawford, had died at age 72. Although Crawford was technically a native of San Antonio, Texas (she was born there as Lucille Fay LeSueur in 1905), Kansas City claimed her as a hometown girl since she arrived in town as a 10-year-old with her mother, her brother and her stepfather. She went by “Billie Cassin” back then, and she spent most of her formative years here. She lived in Kansas City, in fact, right up to the day she hopped on the Missouri Pacific westbound train for Hollywood on New Year’s Day in 1925.
If you believe the many biographers who have taken on the Crawford legend over the last three decades, the petite, 5-foot-5-inch actress learned to become Joan Crawford while growing up in Kansas City. She learned to be driven, conniving, ambitious and an obsessive-compulsive clean freak. Her mother, Anna, was a slatternly laundress who operated a grungy little laundry where the federal courthouse now sits on Ninth Street. Anna was apparently more interested in wringing money out of men than in washing clothes: “As soon as I’d get in the door, she’d tell me to watch the laundry. Then she’d go out with somebody,” Crawford later recalled. Anna did have ambitions for her daughter, however, and twice left her at local boarding schools to serve as an unpaid servant and “guest student,” though she spent more time scrubbing floors and ironing sheets than she did studying.
One of those schools, Rockingham Academy, still stands in Hyde Park: a three-story, stone-and-wood manor home at the corner of 44th and Campbell. Mean old Effie H. Stuttle ran the school, which may have been a racket. The city directories from 1912 to 1919 list no fewer than five addresses for Rockingham Academy. Crawford remembered the so-called school as “little more than a detention home for wayward girls.”
Stuttle was physically violent with the teenage Billie. “Hardly a day went by when the headmistress did not beat me,” Joan Crawford later told a reporter. She lived in a “dusty attic … scrubbed floors, washed windows.” Years later, Crawford would abuse her own daughter, Christina, who published a tell-all book, Mommie Dearest, which became the basis for the movie by the same name.
It was a Cinderella story with a fairy-tale ending: Billie Cassin eventually ran away from the school – and Kansas City – and became a rich, famous movie star named Joan Crawford. There were a few bumps along the way, including silent porno movies she supposedly made before MGM signed her to a contract. And then there were always rumors of a slutty past in Kansas City. One of her biographers quoted a Kansas City matron saying that even when Crawford was a major star in Hollywood, “she had such a terrible reputation here … she was a star everywhere but in her home town.”
Her reputation wasn’t so great in Hollywood, either. Arch-enemy Bette Davis once said: “Joan had sex with every star on the MGM lot except Lassie. And that’s only because Joan wanted to be the one to roll over and beg.” -- Charles Ferruzza
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My great grandfather was a Cassin and they have some dark secret. He was adopted out after his mother died and he was raised by a priest. He always said Billie was related somehow.
His name was James Cassin and he was a ventriloquest in Vaudeville for a while. He later was president for some bank in St. Louis. His son wrote songs and his grandson wrote songs. The Cassin family were all quite entertaining. They like to act, dance, and Amy Cassin has a lot of awards for her Irish dancing.
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