The movie Mecca was too small for the overflowing ego of these two legends. The filming of 'What Happened to Baby Jane?', in which they coincided, unleashed a visceral hatred that lasted until death.
When in her last meeting with journalists she was asked about love, Bette Davis was sincere and precise: "It has not been one of my greatest successes." Just a few days later, on October 6, 1989, the actress died at the American Hospital in Paris, at the age of 81.
Davis had traveled from Los Angeles to Europe not only to receive another award in her laureate career at the San Sebastian Film Festival but to literally die with her boots on, even if it was playing the role of herself on stage. from a distant country. As recorded in the documentary The Last Goodbye of Bette Davis (Pedro Gonzalez Bermudez, 2014), the iron determination and professionalism that the actress demonstrated during those days were overwhelming. She measured each public appearance, meticulously prepared every detail, and controlled something that worried her with an iron hand: being photographed in a wheelchair. Sentenced by advanced cancer, she was a corpse, but nothing undermined her will, and the record that remains of that last breath only enhances her legend.
The gestures are the heritage of the actors and hiding the sentence to a wheelchair is not a trivial detail when we talk about a classic Hollywood star. Joan Crawford, four years older than Davis, who died in 1977 at the age of 69, also from cancer, was well aware of the importance of those gestures that are often labeled as mere diva whims. Director George Cukor said of Crawford that she could be photographed from any angle, because she was always magnificent, although her greatest talent, the most mysterious of all, was her way of walking. “Crawford gets her attention just by moving. She doesn't even need to open her mouth: she just has to walk. And she will be proud ”.
Crawford not only envied Davis, a biographer who tells of her, but had been secretly in love with her.
When in San Sebastián they asked her about her co-star in What Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), Davis preferred to turn his back on the truth: “By working together we disappointed the entire American press, who expected us to pull our hair out. None of that happened and we had a very friendly relationship." As stated in the Feud series, which has brought the famous enmity between the two "beasts" back to the present day, this hackneyed cliché responds to real events. The terrible manipulation to which the two stars were subjected by their bosses, headed by the boss of the study, Jack Warner, responded to a single and perverse goal: divide and conquer. The two actresses gave much more publicity and, therefore, were much more profitable if their relationship was sold as a pathetic fight between two old glories. The cunning of both was useless; They fell into the trap like girls and since Aldrich's film they lived to hate each other.
The 21 days of filming were enough to weave the series of misunderstandings that led to their famous hostility. The film, which meant the return of Davis to Warner, a study that had taken to court to regain his freedom and to be able to direct the course of his career, was the story of two sisters, grotesque ex-girl prodigies, who live trapped in their sunset with seedy Hollywood as a backdrop. A success that established the subgenre of old-stars-interpreting-freak-roles.
What is not told in Feud, played by two enormous Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon, is what can be read in the black chronicle of Hollywood and in many biographies, especially those that save the talented and haughty Davis in front of the beautiful and voracious Crawford. According to Charles Higham, author of Bette Davis Bare Her, Crawford not only envied her co-star but had been secretly in love with her. "Bette was irritated by the fact that Joan had resumed his siege of her by sending her shoes, scarves, and costume jewelry," Higham writes. The supposed passion went back to when the two stars had met for the first time at Warner; there Crawford had tried unsuccessfully to attract her colleague's attention with gifts and dinner invitations that Davis repeatedly refused. Fed up with so many slights, fed by dirty gossip that only wanted to provoke her rivalry, Crawford began to breed the seeds of hatred.
During the filming of Baby Jane, and faced with Davis' new refusal, Crawford became insufferable and fussy, according to Higham. The past of The Witch Joan, as the filmmaker and writer Kenneth Anger called her in his well-known chronicle Hollywood Babylon, was stained by early days in which she had to do more than just P- movies to survive. Crawford reigned in the free and dissolute Hollywood of the twenties, where no one, neither man nor woman, could resist her charms. But with the arrival in the mid-thirties of the fearsome Hays code (with which movie producers regulated what was morally acceptable in a movie), the crystalline air of the Hollywood hills became cloudy and unbreathable. There has been talking of the Sewing Circle, a secret lesbian club that included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and Crawford herself, but the truth is that each one weathered the storm as best they could. In Crawford's case, the way to drown out her homos- was to seduce as many men as possible and, at the same time, build an unbearably neat family postcard with her four adopted children. Obsessed with the image of her, she protected herself with a shell of strident morality. When she was widowed by Alfred Steele, president of Pepsi-Cola, the star became part of the company's board of directors, leading to delirium in the image of her -advertisement of her.
Perhaps the funniest thing about the fight between Bette Davis and her is how the protagonist of The Word (Davis) made Mildred Pierce (Crawford) out of her mind by inviting the entire team to drink the rival brand, Coca-Cola. A dirty war that led to its ultimate consequences the day she organized a Coca-Cola party on the set of Lullaby for a Corpse (Aldrich, 1964). The film tried to exploit the vein of What Happened to Baby Jane? gathering the enemies for the second time. But the idea was a disaster that ended with Crawford in bed and Olivia de Havilland, Davis's friend, taking her job. It was revenge for Crawford's unfortunate role at the 1962 Oscars, where she did everything she could to steal her spotlight and boycott what would have been the third statuette of her nemesis. The Oscar was won by Anne Bancroft for The Miracle of Anne Sullivan but was picked up by Crawford, who volunteered to fill in for the absent Broadway winner. Davis never forgave him.
There was professional jealousy (the Academy had recognized only her work in Bette Davis's Baby Jane), but also the certainty that absolutely nothing could hurt her colleague as much as being left without what she most coveted: a third Oscar. In a 1987 television interview, the elderly Davis confessed with her usual arrogance: “She was furious, she behaved like an idiot, she made us lose a lot of money. I would have been the first person to win three Oscars. And besides, he deserved it. We were, as actresses and as women, very different”.
He was also wrong about the latter because the coincidences between them are not anecdotal: born under the sign of Aries, stubborn as mules, heavy drinkers, married four times, and, now single mothers, incompetent when it comes to loving their offshoots. The revenge of Barbara D. Hyman, Davis' eldest daughter, and that of Christina Crawford, one of her adoptive daughters, was the same: they gave their mothers two books where they exposed the ordeal that according to them had been her childhood. In Mommie Dearest (1978), Christina portrayed her mother as a drunken nymphomaniac, while in My Mother's Keeper (1987), B.D. Hyman portrayed Davis as a selfish tyrant who ruined her life. When she traveled to San Sebastián accompanied by her secretary and several dozen trunks, she had already signed the will that excluded her daughter and her two grandchildren. Crawford did the same thing before she died: she disinherited her eldest children, Christina and Christopher.
The coincidences extend to fiction, to the two masterpieces that have established the modern myth of both actresses. In Eva N- (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Davis gave life to Margo Channing, a torrential actress in her maturity who discovers with terror how a sweet and subservient upstart is capable of anything to supplant her. In Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), Crawford was Vienna, another woman of age and past who decides to throw away her suitcases and set up a gambling hall in a town dominated by a jealous young woman and boss, in the shoes of the masterful Mercedes McCambridge, capable of anything to snatch the arid throne of the desert from the stranger. Margo and Vienna were as alike as Bette and Joan: two scarred goddesses, two warriors fed up with fighting, two women admired by men young and old, two beings threatened by a new order they faced, on and off the screen. with nails and teeth.
