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.
Nothing proved Joan to herself more than her brief marriage to actor Franchot Tone, son of the president of the Carborundum Company, and in the social register, but then Tone made a film called Dangerous and was seduced by his costar, Bette Davis. Class knows class, the message went back to Joan.
They were both great stars, with the same over-emotionalism. Joan was more authentically beautiful, though the young Bette was very sexy. They both slept around. Crawford was also married to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and she had an affair with Clark Gable that lasted most of the '30s. Bette married a bandleader but had a fling with director William Wyler. But Bette said she was no Joan Crawford, meekly accepting any assignment. She wanted better parts, and she pulled rank whenever possible. Years later in her book, The Lonely Life, which she wrote herself, here's how she described the silly froth of Joan's pictures: "This was the period when Joan Crawford would start every film as a factory worker who punched the time clock in a simple, black Molyneux with white piping (someone's idea of poverty) and ended marrying the boss who now allowed her to deck herself out in tremendous buttons, cuffs and shoes with bows (someone's idea of wealth)." It was pretty good movie criticism, and it covered the years in which Joan slaved away while Bette won a first Oscar with Dangerous (1935), a second for Jezebel (1938), and then was nominated for Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), Now, Voyager (1942) and Mr. Skeffington (1944). In those glory years for Davis, Joan got not a single nomination.
In the early '40s, though, Joan was released from her contract by Metro. And now the worm turned. Bette was showing her age. Then Joan signed a contract with Bette's studio, Warners--a comeback. Bette murmured loud enough for the world to hear that Joan needed new lovers. And then Bette raised eyebrows when she said of Joan, "She's slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie." Warners had bought the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce for Bette, but it had been on the shelf: too hot for the censor and too sexy for Bette. Joan got Mildred Pierce in 1945, and won her only Oscar with it. Indeed, Joan lasted rather longer as a star than Bette, though Davis had a last triumph in 1950 with All About Eve.
And so, in 1962, Bette and Joan were both relics brought back for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? They got the film finished, though they were poised on the brink of a quarrel all the time, bad-mouthing each other. Only the business laughed at the finished picture. And only history has shown how alike these two battling broads were.
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David Thomson