Popcorn Disabilities: Joan Crawford Raises a Blind Teen in The Story of Esther Costello
The movie Helen Keller's estate threatened to sue for libel
Welcome to this installment of Popcorn Disability, the series looking at disability through the lens of pop culture.
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By the 1950s, Helen Keller had become a global phenomenon and was on a thirty-city tour as a goodwill ambassador for the American Foundation for the Blind. She was clearly raking in the money, between working for the AFB, collecting royalties from her autobiography, and the soon-to-be success of the Broadway show The Miracle Worker in 1959. At the same time, the government was heavily involved in investigating various charitable foundations for fraud after several high-profile scandals like the Cancer Welfare Fund.
No doubt inspired by all of this, in 1952 author Nicholas Monserrat published The Story of Esther Costello, the story of an inspirational blind girl exploited by people close to her. The book's publication apparently hit too close to home for Keller's people, who contemplated suing Monserrat for libel. Helen Keller is a problematic character in the Deaf/disabled community, and while The Miracle Worker (the film, at least) is.....not good, I can see why they were certainly afraid of the book which I'm on the hunt for now.
Regardless, the juicy behind the scenes story of the book is nothing compared to how Columbia Pictures chose to adapt it for the screen. The Story of Esther Costello isn't just an utterly ludicrous and ridiculous film that plays on a lot of ingrained cinematic tropes regarding blindness and, specifically, blind women. It's also a bad Joan Crawford movie. And, let's be real, about 90% of The Story of Esther Costello is a Joan Crawford movie that just happens to have blindness somewhere in there. So, let's take a deep breath, and talk about Helen Keller, Esther Costello, and why I'd love to see a movie about a blind girl who doesn't get raped/assaulted/harassed by the end.
