The most famous enmity of the seventh art reaches bookstores. A story that was already told by Ryan Murphy in the acclaimed HBO series 'Feud'.
They starred in the greatest duel of divas in film history in What Happened to Baby Jane?, Ambition but the rivalry between Bette Davies and Joan Crawford came from afar, fueled by the ambition and jealousy of both and also by a macho Hollywood that used and discarded actresses after a certain age.
The review of this relationship proposed by Ryan Murphy in the HBO series Feud is now joined by a book, Bette&Joan. Blind ambition, by Guillermo Balmori, film expert, writer, and co-editor at Notorious Ediciones, delves into its causes and circumstances. They came from different social classes. Davies, from a wealthy and educated family, although she loved to swear, while Crawford only knew her misery in his childhood and adolescence, and on the contrary she was "a paragon of prudishness and refinement". According to the author, the one who was a star of the Metro, Crawford, always admired Davies, but not the other way around. "Davies was the great sadist of Hollywood and Crawford the great masochist," she points out on the pages of the book, taking as good a sentence from a critic of the time.
Many of the things that have been written about the bad relationship between the two, from their confrontation over a man, the actor Franchot Tone, to the ins and outs of filming their only movie together, 'What Happened to Baby Jane?', must be taken with some reservation. And it is that not only the reporters and columnists of the time were in charge of getting the most out of an ideal story for a morbid audience, but the film's press officer and even the actresses themselves were in charge of feeding the circus.
Perhaps one of the most famous jokes on the set of the film directed by Robert Aldrich was the kick that Davies gave his partner in the head in a scene in which he was supposed to fake the blows and which was conveniently dressed up by the famous columnist Hedda Hopper. And the revenge that Crawford took on her when in a scene in which Davies had to drag her, a weightlifting belt with lead reinforcements was hidden in her waist.
By then, both had gone through ups and downs in their careers. Both had won at least one Oscar—Crawford for Dead Soul (1945) and Davies for Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938)—but they also knew what it was like to be labeled box office poison. It so happened that Crawford's Oscar was for a role that Davies had turned down. After that, her career languished, while Crawford emerged as the new queen of melodrama at Warners.
Despite all the differences, they had a common wound, parental abandonment. Director Vincent Sherman pointed out this similarity: "Although they loathed each other, under the skin they were sisters. Both had been abandoned by their father, which left them with an eternal distrust of men." The other aspect in common is that they were two character actresses in a male-dominated industry. They had to fight for the studios to offer them interesting roles and this fueled their rivalry. Bette Davies came to stand up to Jack Warner himself in court.
In the trial, there was talk of "labor slavery" and clauses by which an actor was forced to do everything the studio ordered him to do come to light. Despite this, the judge agreed with Warner, although at least Davies managed to improve her contract with the studio.
