Thoughts on ‘Feud,’ honoring the real Crawford and Davis
“THE PEOPLE, the public, they don’t care about the rest. They remember the good things, the work.”
It’s half-amusing and half-sad that producer Ryan Murphy put these words in the mouth of the great and sexy Stanley Tucci, aka Jack Warner, in the season fifinale of Ryan’s FX series “Feud: Bette and Joan” on Sunday night.
Over the past couple of months we’ve ( mostly me, Denis) have talked a lot about “Feud,” and we’ve wanted to believe that producer Ryan was sincere in his insistence that the show was not to be a grisly camp-fest, but a real look at the issues of women aging out in Hollywood, misogyny, etc. Yes and no.
Ryan of “American Horror Story” fame couldn’t resist the occasional camp and grotesquerie of Bette and Joan in their later years. However, thanks to the brilliant performances of Susan Sarandon as Bette and Jessica Lange as Crawford, the more serious, and touching aspects of these two wildly complex women — great stars, great actors, great phonies — came through like laser beams. (I admit, aspects of the fifinal episode were fairly harrowing, as to women living alone.)
Crawford was pretentious, which made her phoniness more obvious. Davis, looser, funnier, bellowed her “honestly,” but was equally fake, prone to fantasy — “Crawford lobbied against me and lost me the Baby Jane’ Oscar” — and addicted to conflflict. Bette’s epitaph reads “She did it the hard way.” But all too often, she didn’t have to, she preferred it.
Lange and Sarandon deserve Emmy nominations. Perhaps both will win. I’d prefer to see Lange take the prize, because Crawford did fifight harder for respect; her glamour was an albatross and her insecurity overwhelming. Maybe on that big sound set in the sky she’d feel vindicated. We shall see.
NOW, I’VE asked my partner, Liz Smith, for some of her own recollections of Joan and Bette. Says Liz:
“I knew both of them after their tempestuous younger days, shall we say. Crawford had me to her home in Los Angeles when her twins were little. I met all four children and observed them on a Christmas day. They all seemed petrifified to speak, or to open a gift without permission from Joan. She seemed to bend over backward to make a good impression, yet Joan was one of the most uncomfortable women in her own house that I’d ever met. But she was undeniably glamorous!”
“I met Miss Davis at NBC during the Live at Five’ days. She ordered everyone around, insisted on certain lighting and make-up. She was a pain in the a — , but — ta da! — she turned out to be right on all counts. Also, she looked great, and I looked like a mile of bad road. But who cared? The actress Geraldine Fitzgerald also told me a lot of Bette stories from their days at Warner Bros., and how Bette inspired her to fifight for her rights.
“The agent Michael Black was also a font of amusing Bette anecdotes. She fell out with me at an awards dinner. I was seated near her. I made an innocuous remark, asking if she was ever “nervous” during such events — she had just made a presentation. Bette gave me a glare that Medusa would have envied and barked “Never!” She would not look or speak to me again, and actually got up and left the table, leaving me obviously, embarrassingly alone. (I was sure people were wondering, ‘what did that awful gossip columnist say to poor Bette Davis?’)
“They were incredible in their individual ways, but I felt both were so, so insecure! Later, after cancer and strokes had weakened her, Bette was still up for a fifight. She was so awful to Lillian Gish during the making of “The Whales of August” that Gish, a great star from the silent era, said the experience almost killed her!”