The insane feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford
Hollywood history is filled with dramatic feuds. Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson. Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine. Olivia De Havilland and Joan Fontaine. John. Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel. Whatever the hell was going on with Don’t Worry Darling.
But nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever match the feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Although both of these women were extraordinarily talented actors, they were well-known for being difficult to work with, and it seems they reserved the heaviest blows from each other.
So, what actually happened?
Like some feuds tend to do, it all started with a relatively minor occurrence – Crawford’s divorce from her first husband overshadowed the release of Davis’ first picture, and as a result of reduced publicity, the film (Ex-Lady) underperformed at the box office. This wasn’t Crawford’s fault or a product of any malicious intentions, but it made Davis resentful of her nonetheless – and this resentment would never go away.
Just a couple of years later, Crawford married Franchot Tone, the man Davis was in love with, and then, when Davis won an Oscar for Dangerous, Tone congratulated her while Crawford coldly snubbed Davis, mocking her attire, by sneering, “Dear Bette, what a lovely frock”. Both of these events increased the animosity between the pair, and although Crawford tried to extend an olive branch to Davis when they shared dressing rooms near one another, Davis rejected any idea of a truce. Both actors would often insult the other behind their backs.
Davis always resolutely said, “Miss Crawford is a movie star, and I am an actress”, and tried to distance herself from Crawford, yet the pair often seemed curiously intertwined. They were clearly far more alike than Davis wanted to admit. In the latter half of the 1940s, Crawford took on two lead roles originally meant for Davis – the first of these, in Michael Curtiz’s fantastic Mildred Pierce, won Crawford her only Oscar. Later, in the 1952 film The Star, Davis plays a character who appeared to be an unflattering parody of Crawford.
By the 1960s, both actors were struggling and urgently needed a hit, and the result of this was one of those strange junctures in which a dramatic climax to a real-life situation just sort of happens into existence. The pair starred in their only film together – the 1963 horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? – and their feud reached its absolute apex.
When Davis signed onto the film – which tells the story of former child star Jane (Davis) tormenting her wheelchair-bound former-film star sister Blanche (Crawford) – she had two conditions: that she played Jane, and that Crawford wasn’t sleeping with the film’s director. Both conditions were met, and so the filming began. However, it didn’t take long until the women were at each other’s throats. The pair were constantly arguing; they phoned up director Robert Aldrich to complain about each other on a nightly basis, and Davis is alleged to have called Crawford a c**t on multiple occasions – all while Crawford was in earshot.
The barbs weren’t just verbal, though. Davis deliberately hit Crawford as hard as possible during a scene in which Jane beats Blanche, and in another scene where Jane drags Blanche, Crawford made herself as heavy as possible. She knew perfectly well that Davis endured back problems and is claimed to have deliberately ruined several takes. By the end, Davis was in complete agony.
The drama didn’t end once filming stopped, though. The critically and commercially successful film was nominated for several Oscars, but only Davis received recognition. In the end, she lost out to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker, and Davis was beyond astonished when Crawford went up on stage to accept the award on Bancroft’s behalf. Crawford had arranged with several of the other actors who couldn’t attend the ceremony that she would pick up their Oscars should they win.
You simply couldn’t make it up if you tried.
The pair were actually set to work together again after the success of Baby Jane in another psychological thriller called Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, but Crawford quickly quit the production, claiming she was ill but actually wished to avoid Davis. She was eventually replaced by Olivia De Havilland. The pair never worked together again, which was probably for the best.
When Crawford died in 1977, Davis is rumoured to have said, “You should never say bad things about the dead; you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good,” but this remains unconfirmed. Nonetheless, Davis did actually defend Crawford when Crawford’s adopted daughter released a memoir detailing years of abuse at her mother’s hands. She stated, “I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter.” In one final, bizarre twist, something similar happened to Davis, one of her daughters wrote a book attacking her as well.
The story of the Crawford-Davis feud is a rather extraordinary one, filled with twists, turns and drama. All things considered, it’s baffling that it took until 2018 for this feud to be recreated on-screen. It was adapted, very well, by Ryan Murphy for the first season of his anthology show Feud – featuring Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis – and thus, this astonishing true-life story of behind-the-scenes drama finally got the on-screen realisation it’s always deserved.
