March 23 (Joan Crawford/Assia Wevill)

March 23 is a red-letter day for me, being the creator of the world's largest Joan Crawford website. It's Joan's birthday. So of course I expected a heavier amount of traffic, mainly on the Best of Everything site, but also here, on my blog.

What I didn't expect, though, was a strangely large number of hits to this blog originating from a photo I posted here back in June 2007, of Assia Wevill's daughter Shura. (I have a stat counter installed that allows seeing the web address through which visitors enter the site.)

Then it clicked: Assia Wevill killed herself, and her daughter Shura, on March 23, 1969. So I suppose people are remembering Wevill/Shura, and my blog posts about them from back in 2007 are showing up in their searches.

It's a bizarre thing for me to see the conflicting reasons for people visiting my blog on this March 23: I love and admire Joan, and all she stands for (hard work, talent, gumption, self-sufficiency). I despise Assia Wevill and everything she stands for (laziness, no talent, relying on men for survival/approval, murdering her child).

In short: Look at the two pictures below and think for a second:

One of these little girls sitting on her Mommie's lap got gassed by her mother. (And the mother's somehow regarded as a sensitive martyr.)
The other little girl was forced by her mother to write Christmas cards and lived to write a tell-all. (And the mother's somehow regarded as a pariah.)

The hypocrisy of this makes me sick.