Hollywood's Greatest Catfight

The world has relished the evil verbal warfare between Sharon Stone and Madonna, Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth. But nothing beats the lashings Joan Crawford and Bette Davis gave each other.

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Celebrity tabloids make it seem as if the nastiest star wars are being waged right now. But the truth is the most ruthless Hollywood catfighting happened decades ago, and it was not between pop stars or models, but between real screen royalty.

There was a time when Joan Crawford and Bette Davis both claimed to have been born in 1908, but Bette never believed it. She never trusted anything said by or about Joan. And in the business of age, facts proved her right: Joan was really two years older. Bette outlived her rival by 12 full years--not that there was much comfort in that last era of madness. If Bette lived to witness the acid of Christina Crawford's book, Mommie Dearest, which came a year after Joan's death in 1977, she also survived long enough to be around when her own daughter, B.D. Hyman, told the world that her mother was a cruel, abusive drunk.

You can take your pick as to whether Joan or Bette was more correct in the unkind assessment of her rival, or you can see how much they needed and played off each other. It was Joan's intuition that they had become like sisters--so why not grasp the nettle? The stinging plant was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a big hit and, for both of them, the swan song in a failing career. The film was also a merciless, sardonic exploitation of stars who had become hags; not just Norma Desmond, but Norma on a bag-lady budget. Throughout the production they told horrible stories about each other. Bette said she never had more fun than when serving Joan a dead rat, cooked rare.

Joan got her payback moment in the wings at the Oscars the next year. Bette had been nominated--not Joan. But when the prize went to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker, Joan had volunteered in advance to accept the award if Bancroft (tied up onstage in New York) won. So Joan was able to give Bette the steely glance and an "Excuse me!"

The secret to the rivalry between Bette and Joan lay in their claims on respectability. Bette thought herself serious, and she guessed that Joan went in fear of being thought absurd. So Bette was proud of her New England stock (Lowell, Massachusetts) and a father who was a patents attorney. She had been nicely and properly raised, and then sent into the theater as a young girl. She always fought for better contracts. The shameful exclusion of her performance in Of Human Bondage had led to reform of the whole Oscar system. What could "Joan" say to that?

In an age when the wildness of the West was hardly gone, Joan was from San Antonio, Texas. Born Lucille Le Sueur, she had scarcely known her real father. She had moved to Oklahoma and had then taken her stepfather's name, and as Billie Cassin she had worked as a waitress and a dancer. There were legends of her sleazy background, and later on, after she'd been taken on at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the studio had run a contest to find a new name for her, "Joan Crawford," a blue movie purportedly involving "Joan" was sent to the studio. The bosses examined the film closely with the result that she was cleared but humiliated. And throughout all her years at Metro, Joan was less than a lady--roles fitting that description were filled by Garbo, Norma Shearer and Jeanette MacDonald, while she played working girls, tramps who made good and low-life hustlers trying to pass for respectable.

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