Word: joan
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...their children grown, found themselves hard pressed. To make matters worse, some people felt they were not getting their money's worth, claiming the schools were failing to teach the basics. The result was a hard line on taxes. "I'm a fighter for my kids," says Joan Anderson, the mother of four. "But I'm working two jobs and my husband is out of work. We just couldn't afford to pay any more...
...another night Chris and Christina were roused from their beds to find a maniacal Joan cutting down her beautiful rose garden. They were then ordered with the servants to cart away the remains. "We were all scratched and bleeding," Christina says, "[but] Mother wouldn't let us stop until we were finished...
...life was for Christina, it was worse for Chris. To smother his boyish spirits, Joan bought a "sleep safe," a harness-like gadget used to keep babies from rolling out of bed. Joan, however, had it modified for a growing boy and strapped Chris into bed every night until he was twelve. If he needed to go to the toilet, he had to call Joan, who was often not around, or persuade Christina to disobey orders and release...
...hate. Chris, who is a $200-a-week electrical lineman on Long Island, knows exactly how he feels. "I hated the bitch," a Newsday reporter quotes him as saying. "I honestly to this day do not believe that she ever cared for me." He may very well be right; Joan disinherited both of her older children, leaving them out of an estate estimated at about $2 million. Chris and Christina are now challenging the will in court, claiming that their mother was a "habitual, heavy user of alcohol" who was confused by cancer when she wrote it. They further charge...
...Christina not write her book when her mother was alive to defend herself? "The story was not yet finished," she replies, somewhat disingenuously. "I had no idea how it would end." Many of Joan's friends, some of whom confirm the basic facts of Christina's grim tale, are nonetheless sorry that it ended this way. "I cried when I read the book," says one of them, Screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass. "But I really cried for Joan. There is an absolute nausea among her friends in learning these things...