New series asks, Whatever happened to Joan and Bette?

Legendary rivals Joan Crawford and Bette Davis did one movie together.

Long past their box-office prime, Davis was 54 and Crawford was 58 when they made Robert Aldrich’s “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” If they didn’t like each other going into the film, by the end there was true vitriol for the image-conscious actresses.

The story is being told in “Feud: Bette and Joan,” the first installment of the new FX anthology series from Ryan Murphy that airs March 5. The two Oscar-winning actresses are played by two Academy Award winners — Jessica Lange as Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Davis.

Both actresses gambled on the horror film “Baby Jane” to revive their careers, since they were considered long past their prime.

“Aging actresses still have the same problem. I can guarantee that,” says Sarandon.

Murphy agrees, saying while the “Feud” is set in 1962, “the themes and issues in the show are so modern, and women are still going through this sort of stuff today,” and they “really wanted to lean into that aspect of the show.”

Lange notes that Crawford was 10 years younger than she is now when “Baby Jane” was being shot. “Yet her career was finished because of her age.”

Lange tells a story about legendary studio head Jack Warner’s reaction when Aldrich (played by Alfred Molina) pitched the movie to him. Supposedly he sniffed, “Would you (screw) these two broads?”

As Lange points out, Crawford had been known for her tremendous beauty. No doubt she was also a terrific actress, but she had been reduced to occasional TV guest roles for years when she found the novel “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” and took it to Aldrich.

Crawford even proposed Davis as her co-star. Despite their dislike of each other, their careers were entwined. Crawford’s only Oscar was for “Mildred Pierce,” a role Davis turned down.

When she was offered “Baby Jane,” Davis, too, was pretty much doing TV guest spots and theater. So both powerful personalities craved a chance to be back in the spotlight.

Though Murphy has done high camp in his “American Horror Story” anthology, he wasn’t interested in doing so with the first season of “Feud,” already been picked up for a second round, which will focus on Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

The showrunner, who began his career as a film journalist, says he spent time interviewing Davis late in her life.

“You go into something like that expecting a very larger-than-life, camp figure, which I think she helped propagate,” he says. “But she told me that she felt that she was never going to be anybody unless somebody could impersonate her.”

Lange found it interesting that Crawford was “never not on.”

“When Joan was in public, she was performing. So it was very hard to find a moment where you could really discern what the heart and soul of that character was,” she says.

The actress explains that Crawford came from poverty in Texas and likely was

physically and sexually abused when she was young. With only a fifth-grade education, she was schooled by MGM, where she began as a contract player.

She was taught how to act, walk and talk with that upper-class, mid-Atlantic accent, but once in a while, says Lange, Crawford’s Texas roots would show.

“Because Joan was alcoholic, there are moments where everything falls away, and there is this kind of ugliness and brutality to her that I think she is a fascinating character to play,” says Lange.

Of course, Crawford was most infamously portrayed by Faye Dunaway in 1981’s “Mommie Dearest,” just four years after the actress’s death. It was based on the 1978 tell-all book by Christina Crawford, her adopted daughter. She alleged abusive behavior by her mother, who had disinherited her.

In the film “Baby Jane,” Joan Crawford played Blanche Hudson, a wheelchair-bound former big Hollywood star. Davis was the title character, a childhood star, but unlike her sister had a failed career when she became an adult. An “accident” leaves Blanche’s legs paralyzed, and an embittered Jane cares for her in a creepy old house.

As usual, Crawford was concerned about how she looked during the shooting, but Davis went full method actor, donning one of Crawford’s blond wigs and painting her face white. She then walked on the set and greeted Aldrich with a loud “Hello, Daddy.” The director of films like “The Dirty Dozen” applauded her.

Murphy says Davis told him she wanted to look like a woman who hadn’t washed in years and instead put on another layer of white Kabuki

paint.

“That was the inspiration, and Joan was horrified,” says Murphy.

The two actresses, however, knew they needed each other and kept the nastier parts of what went on during the filming from the public, though everyone knew they were rivals.

It didn’t help when Davis received an Oscar nomination and Crawford didn’t.

Murphy says he thinks that the two actresses were mistreated at the end of their careers.

“The last movie Joan Crawford did, ‘Trog,’ is where she acted a role opposite a man with an ape head on. And Bette Davis, in that period, did eight television pilots that never were picked up,” he explains. “That idea that you as a human being have so much more to offer, and you still love what you can do so much, but you’re not being given that opportunity, that was what I really was moved by.”