Hollywood’s most venomous feud
It began over a man, raged for decades and is brought to life in a new TV drama. But Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s mutual loathing didn’t stop one trying to bed the other!
THEIRS was the longest, most ferocious, and most unrelenting feud in Hollywood history. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, both Oscar-winning stars, hated each other with an all-consuming passion for 42 years, although both denied it publicly and in interviews.
For years it was assumed their bitter decadeslong war arose from their utterly contrasting backgrounds and characters.
While Davis was a New England-born, classicallytrained stage actress, Crawford was a socialclimbing glamour-puss from the wrong side of the tracks whose success, in Davis’s estimation, depended entirely on looks and sex.
But as Davis revealed to me during her last visit to London, two years before her death in 1989, the real and festering cause of their mutual hatred was a man.
A man with whom Davis fell desperately in love, but who, in her eyes, was stolen from her by Crawford, who married him, divorced him four years later, and then, 30 years later still, when he was dying from lung cancer, took back into her home and nursed him until his death.
Now, 40 years after the death of Crawford, and 27 years after that of Davis, this extraordinary saga of love and possession is finally coming to the television screen in a multi-million-dollar eight-part series, Feud: Bette And Joan.
It is produced and directed by Ryan Murphy, who was responsible for another blockbuster TV series, The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Starring two Oscar-winning actresses — Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford — the series premieres in the U.S. tomorrow with a UK date to be announced.
Britain’s own Oscar-winning Catherine ZetaJones plays Hollywood’s Olivia de Havilland — the sole survivor of the saga today, who is still alive in Paris at the age of 100.
Feud is set in 1962, the year in which Davis and Crawford made their only film together, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, an outrageous piece of melodrama which, against the expectations of every studio boss in Tinseltown, packed cinemas worldwide and resurrected both stars — after years in the Hollywood wilderness — from the box office dead.
But in spite of the professionalism of both Davis and Crawford, the making of the film was a traumatic business, complicated by what had happened in their lives almost 30 years earlier.
The origin of their feud was a case of unrequited love on both sides. Even in the earliest days of their acquaintance, Davis viewed Crawford with contempt, believing she was a woman who used sex to advance her career.
‘She slept with every star at MGM,’ Bette announced later. ‘Of both sexes.’
This was true. Most of Crawford’s leading men had succumbed to her sexual magnetism. And she counted such female stars as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and, later, Marilyn Monroe among her lesbian lovers.
Crawford, a flagrantly promiscuous bisexual, was infatuated with Davis, but had her overtures rebuffed by the firmly heterosexual Bette.
In 1935, when the feud began, Davis was 27 and had just been cast by her studio, Warner Bros, in Dangerous, the film that was to win her the first of her Best Actress Oscars.
Playing opposite her was the tall, dark and attractive 30-year-old actor Franchot Tone, born into a well-to-do upstate New York family and a graduate of the Ivy League Cornell University.
Davis had been married for three years to her high school sweetheart, the musician Harmon Oscar ‘Ham’ Nelson, but the marriage lacked passion and was regarded as a failure.
WITHIN a few days of commencing work on Dangerous, it became obvious to everyone on the set that Davis was deeply attracted to Tone.
‘If the truth be known,’ she admitted years later, ‘I fell in love with Franchot, professionally and privately. Everything about him reflected his elegance, from his name to his manners.’
There was only one problem. Joan Crawford, MGM’s reigning sex symbol and recently divorced from Hollywood’s dashing Crown Prince, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, had got to Tone before her.
But Crawford’s seduction of Tone had not diminished her wish to add Davis to her list of conquests.
‘Franchot isn’t interested in Bette,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood.’
When Crawford first entertained Tone at her Hollywood home, he found her in the solarium, tanned from head to foot, and stark naked. According to friends and neighbours, Tone did not emerge from the solarium until nightfall.
‘He was madly in love with her,’ Davis admitted bitterly. ‘They met each day for lunch. After lunch, he would return to the set, his face covered in lipstick. He made sure we all knew it was Crawford’s lipstick.’
Consumed by jealousy, the normally reserved and discreet Bette threw caution to the wind in her desperation to prise Tone from Crawford.
Harry Joe Brown, the crew supervisor on Dangerous, was astonished to see Davis on her knees pleasuring Tone in one of their dressing rooms. ‘When they saw me, they didn’t seem to give a damn,’ said Brown.
But Davis’s sexual overtures did not succeed. During the filming of Dangerous, Crawford announced her engagement to Franchot Tone. To Davis’s fury, they were married in New Jersey soon after the film was completed.
‘She took him from me,’ Davis told me bitterly in 1987. ‘She did it coldly, deliberately, and with complete ruthlessness. I have never forgiven her for that, and I never will.’
Both women were to marry four times, but Crawford’s divorce from Tone in 1939 did not end the bitterness. In 1968, the feud erupted again when Davis learned that Tone, the love of her life, and a chronic chain smoker, was dying from lung cancer.
Crawford took her ex-husband into her nine-room New York apartment, and nursed him until his death, even supervising the scattering of his ashes.
‘The poor bastard was dying, but still that bitch wouldn’t let him go!’ raged Davis. ‘She had to monopolise him, even in death.’
Davis won a second Academy Award for Jezebel in 1938, making her the No.1 box office star at Warner Bros. But the mid-Forties were to bring a downswing in her popularity, threatening her position as queen of the studio.
As Bette’s star began to dim, Crawford left MGM and came to Warner Bros, where she demanded the dressing room next to Davis.
In Mildred Pierce, her first major picture for the studio, Crawford upstaged Davis by winning a Best Actress Oscar, and was signed by Warner Bros to a sevenyear contract at $200,000 a film.
Davis was aghast. Having watched helplessly as Crawford stole the love of her life, she was now forced to look on as her rival made a determined assault on her Hollywood crown.
None of this stopped Crawford making more overtures to Davis, all of which were rebuffed by Davis.
Hearing that Crawford had told gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she and Davis ‘may even do a picture together’,
Bette commented implacably: ‘When hell freezes over.’
Yet, ironically, by the early Sixties, when both stars, now in their 50s, were regarded as box office poison, it was Crawford who came to her rival’s rescue by finding the novel that teamed them both in the most sensational comeback in cinema history.
In What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Davis was inspirationally cast as Baby Jane Hudson, a demented and alcoholic former child star, who allegedly cripples her sister Blanche, a Hollywood movie queen (Crawford) in a mysterious car accident.
Jack Warner, the former studio boss of Davis and Crawford, flatly refused to finance the film, commenting: ‘I wouldn’t give you one dime for those two washed-up old bitches.’
As Davis later recounted with glee in a series of chat shows, studio after studio rejected the project, telling producer-director Robert Aldrich: ‘If you get rid of those two old broads and sign some real box office names, we’ll give you the money.’
But Aldrich remained adamant that he would only make the film with Davis and Crawford, and went ahead on a modest budget with a lightning-fast six-week schedule.
‘Fasten your seat-belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!’ Davis had memorably vowed in All About Eve — she might have been referring to the making of Baby Jane.
On-set observers noticed Davis running her pen through whole pages of the script.
‘Whose dialogue are you cutting, Bette?’ enquired Crawford. ‘Yours,’ snapped Davis.
When Crawford, widow of PepsiCola boss Alfred Steele, provided the set with an enormous Pepsi cooler, Davis discovered that Joan’s own bottle of Pepsi, constantly at her elbow, was always half-full of vodka.
‘That bitch is loaded half the time!’ raged Bette. ‘How dare she pull this crap on a picture with me? I’ll kill her!’
In a scene dramatised in the new TV series, Davis, who was supposed only to simulate violence, raises and swings her right foot to kick her crippled sister on the floor. But she made contact with Crawford’s head, gashing her scalp, which required three stitches, and raising a lump the size of an egg.
As Jessica Lange, as Crawford, screams and writhes on the floor, Susan Sarandon, as Davis, protests: ‘I barely touched her.’
When Baby Jane was released, complete with the baroque scene in which Davis serves up a dead rat on a silver salver for Crawford’s supper, it packed cinemas and became a blockbuster hit.
Both stars, who were on a percentage of the profits, made a fortune. Davis was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. Crawford was not. At the Oscars ceremony, when Anne Bancroft was announced as Best Actress, Crawford swept past Davis to receive the Oscar on behalf of the absent Bancroft.
Next day’s newspapers showed Crawford holding the Oscar which her lifelong rival had failed to win. Davis was incandescent.
Two years later, when Aldrich attempted to re-team Davis and Crawford in another film, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, their escalating hatred defeated him.
AVENgEFuL Davis assembled the cast and crew, minus Crawford, for photographs in which they all ostentatiously drank Coca-Cola, Pepsi’s rival. Crawford, overwhelmed by Davis’s hostility, succumbed to pneumonia, possibly diplomatic in origin, and was replaced in the film by Olivia de Havilland, a close friend of Davis.
On May 10, 1977, and weighing only 90lb, Joan Crawford died at her New York apartment at the age of 73. The official cause of death was ‘acute coronary occlusion’, but the real cause was pancreatic cancer.
In her will, Crawford disinherited her adopted daughter, Christina, and her adopted son, Christopher. A year later, Christina responded with the book, Mommie Dearest, which painted Joan as a drunken, abusive and sadistic mother.
‘I don’t blame the daughter, don’t blame her at all,’ commented Davis. ‘One area of life Joan should never have gone into was
children. I’ve never behaved like ... well, I doubt that my children will write a book.’
But here the ghost of Joan Crawford had the last laugh. For in 1985, after Davis suffered a stroke, her own daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, published My Mother’s Keeper, depicting Bette as ‘a mean-spirited, neurotic, profane and pugnacious boozer who took out her anger at the world by abusing those close to her’.
Like Crawford before her, Davis also disinherited her daughter. The ironic similarities between the two women may have been too great for Davis to confront.
Even two years after Crawford’s death, Davis continued to maintain the fiction that there had been no feud. To a female interviewer who suggested Crawford had been her enemy, Davis responded in a tone of ‘sugared innocence’.
‘Miss Crawford and I weren’t enemies,’ she insisted. ‘We made one film together. We didn’t know each other at all.’
But in private it was a very different matter. Out of the earshot of the media, Davis continued to heap scorn on her rival’s memory until the end of her days.
In 1987, approaching her 80th birthday, and during the filming of her penultimate movie, The Whales Of August, the mere mention of Crawford’s name provoked a tirade of bitterness and fury from Davis in front of the cast and crew.
The director of the film, Lindsay Anderson, slammed his hand on the table and told Davis bluntly that Crawford had been a friend of his and that he wasn’t going to listen to any more.
But Davis was not to be silenced. Banging her own fist down even harder, she delivered her final comment on her great adversary in the most celebrated feud in Hollywood history. ‘Just because a person’s dead,’ she shouted, ‘doesn’t mean they changed!’