The Feud of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford | 1963: Pt. 2

in 1963 ann bancroft won the best actress oscar for her performance in the miracle worker and who was starring in mother courage on broadway decided not to attend the ceremony joan crawford had offered to accept the oscar on her behalf should she win and ann said yes at face value jones offer doesn't seem particularly weird or shady except anne's fellow nominee was betty davis who was jones co-star in whatever happened to baby jane and she was furious this moment has come to represent a now legendary feud between two cinematic titans as a fan of classic films this feud has always struck me as equal parts thrilling and troublesome i love any excuse to talk about betty joan and especially whatever happened to baby jane which happens to be one of my favorite movies but it also doesn't seem fair that our popular imagination has essentially distilled their cumulative 70 plus years in the film industry down to this one movie when the feud becomes the focus we one tend to overlook ann bancroft whose wonderful performance in the miracle worker simply serves as a subplot to betty and jones rivalry my attempt at remedying that oversight makes up part one of this series which i'll link below and two we fail to see betty and joan as fully formed people and instead has exaggerated caricatures constantly scheming to undermine each other while they are larger than life figures they are not one-dimensional and deserve to be treated maturely this video is hopefully an answer to that perspective first i'm going to break down who betty and joan were the strategies they employed to succeed and how they differed then we'll transition into their relationship and talk about the situations that might have prompted conflict as well as debunk some of the more common myths about them finally we'll end with a look at the 1963 oscars and take a look at why that night looms so large and its cultural repercussions let's just jump right in there were never two more opposed actresses working together in the world just total totally different people and systems betty davis and joan crawford were frequently asked about each other in interviews and most of the time their responses began with some kind of comment like that that they're very different people watch a few interviews of the two of them and it'll take you about 30 seconds to understand what they mean jonah's serious careful usually clad in jewelry or a glittery dress while interviews with betty feel a little more like getting on a roller coaster her boisterous energy carries you along as she waves her cigarette and cracks a few great jokes the differences between betty and jonas people influenced not only the roles they played but also the strategies they employed to become major stars so to understand their relationship you have to understand who they were where they were coming from and how their learned experience might work in opposition with each other and hear me out but i think a good place to start is their names ruth elizabeth davis was nicknamed betty with a y as a child around age 13 a friend who had just read a french novel casually suggested that betty become betty she liked the idea and adopted the spelling when she arrived in hollywood and the studio executive suggested that she change her name entirely as they did with nearly every major star oh yes they wanted to call me bettina dawes she refused yes betty changed her name but only on her own terms both to assert and distinguish the identity she already had in lucille lesora's early days at mgm the studio ran a contest to determine the new name for the up-and-coming actress the winning idea joan arden already belonged to another actress so mgm gave her the second place winner joan crawford at first she hated it and thought it sounded like crawfish or cranberry but she stuck with it one can't quite imagine betty davis embracing a name that was the second place winner in a public contest but for joan this was not a reaffirmation of self rather it was the surrender of self to what audiences and her studio thought a star should be for her success came through assimilation so even at the very birth of their careers in hollywood with the most fundamental aspect of their identities we can see their respective approaches and priorities taking shape and you can trace this contrast between assertion and assimilation throughout their careers recruited from the broadway stage betty davis arrived in hollywood with training experience and a strong sense of self as ed sikhov wrote in his biography of her belief in herself above all others was the central tenet of davis lifelong faith she intuitively understood that she would only succeed by being true to herself as an artist so rebellion became her method of self-preservation resulting in serious challenges to the hierarchy of the studio system and a purposeful subversion of what it meant to look like a star when i went to warner's they made me you know really bleach my hair and i knew it was going to limit me apart so i snuck down one day and had it you know put back the ash blonde hair i'd always had and one year later mr wallace sent for me he said you've had your hair re-dyed one year later he'd never seen it but if i had gone for permission he wouldn't have allowed it you see where most stars shied away from unsympathetic roles or kept on heavy makeup even if they were supposed to look like they were dying betty didn't never seen as a glamorous woman she found her strength in character work carl and lee jr once said she had the sex appeal of slim somerville this is slim summerville in of human bondage she did her own makeup to actually look sick in marked woman she did it again to actually look injured as queen elizabeth she shaved her eyebrows and hairline for period accuracy these transformations may seem commonplace now but it was shocking and exciting and bold for her audiences her leadership efforts were equally bold once nicknamed the fourth warner brothers she never hesitated to challenge her superiors even famously taking them to court for better roles much more on that later she served as the first female president of the academy had her own production company and founded slash ran the hollywood canteen an entertainment venue for soldiers during world war ii our first president and still our president get betty davis she knew exactly how she wanted to do things and she would fight to make everyone else want it too prior to her arrival in hollywood joan crawford had practically zero acting experience or training little education and had survived a childhood marred by poverty and sexual abuse including by her own stepfather unlike betty she did not try to conquer the system rather she mastered how best to work within it becoming stardom's most diligent student myrna loy jones close friend and fellow mgm contract player wrote in her memoir that there was something gloriously absurd in jones devotion to the duties of stardom she shed her texan accent spent hours trying on new personas in the mgm photography studio for various advertisements and covered up her freckled complexion with thick layers of foundation which is a shame because they're great sometimes you can kind of spot them peeking through she emerged as one of the most glamorous women of the era typically playing some kind of romantic object of affection joan constantly kept up with the zeitgeist iterating on her identity to prolong her relevance she knew exactly how to read the room and mold herself to the moment secondly i try to get a film that has audience identification going from a flapper in the 20s to a working girl in the 30s in a mature elegant professional in the 40s her shrewd sense for the system helped her cunningly navigate the valleys of her career she took smaller supporting roles she knew would give her a boost when she needed it most like in 1939's the women and demonstrated a good instinct for collaborators she spent years for example searching for the right vehicle for her and betty before baby jane she knew exactly what executives and audiences wanted and she would fight to become that for them so betty and joan employed very different strategies and became very different stars yet both had to be similarly tenacious and ambitious to succeed as one critic later observed in the new york times both of their stories proved in hollywood a woman becomes a star not only by acting but also by locating the main chants and grabbing it she needs not only talent but also the constitution of a horse and the temperament of a wild cat so how did they function in relation to each other what happens when wildcat meets wildcat there was never a rivalry like theirs for nearly half a century they hated each other and we love them for it those are the opening lines of ryan murphy's 2017 miniseries feud betty and joan dramatic for sure the problem is that like much of the show it's not exactly accurate and don't worry we'll get to all of that in a minute but the line gets at a common misconception that has made the feud so durable that as two of the most famous women of the classic era they spent decades fuming over each other however it remains that betty davis and joan crawford had very little reason to care about each other and very few opportunities to interact for the vast majority of their careers under the studio system an actor's studio was like their family so an actress's concerns about roles any problems she had with a castmate or director and most of the competition she would face happened within that family betty spent the bulk of her career at warner brothers and joan at mgm meaning they almost never crossed paths in their day-to-day work the group of people i knew the most were the people that i worked with at warner's all those 18 years and if i had been at metro probably would have known many of those people much more because they all knew each other on a certain level all major actresses were rivals for the public's attention but it wouldn't really make sense to actively harbor hostility toward a specific actress at another studio especially one who made completely different films and played completely different roles both betty and joan had much more pressing concerns at their respective homes which haven't received quite as much attention in pop culture but which affected their careers to a much larger extent joan began her time at mgm in the shadow of norma shear like literally she played her body devil but eventually rose to compete with her for roles in 1930 mgm's head of production irving thulberg started looking for an actress to star in the divorcee a movie about a woman who starts an affair with her husband's best friend as revenge after she finds out that he cheated on her sounds like a joan crawford movie right well he thought so too except he happened to be married to norma scheer who also wanted the role he initially didn't believe that norma had the steamy brand of sex appeal needed for the part which wow what was that conversation like anyway so she arranged a nice vampy photo shoot for herself which convinced him otherwise again awkward but she won the role and shortly thereafter the oscar the competition between them continued throughout the 30s but both were smart enough to know that it would make for excellent interplay in 1939's the women in the 1940s greer garson quickly became a favorite at mgm like norma she was considered more of a serious actress rather than just a movie star and she won big roles in expensive prestige productions that joan believed she deserved after spending over a decade working her way to the top mgm's preference became super clear in 1941 when the studio promoted greer's performance in blossoms in the dust over jones in a woman's face as greer racked up back to back oscar nominations literally she got five in a row joan kept receiving terrible scripts and losing out on roles she wanted including madame curie which duh greer played eventually contributing to her decision to leave mgm it's important to note though that jones biographer writes that joan mostly blamed the studio for all of this and that her relationship with greer was largely cordial they also made a great movie together which i talk a bit about in my 1946 video over at warner brothers betty davis is well-known disdain for miriam hopkins flared up every now and again sometimes over rolls most famously jezebel miriam starred in the stage version of the story and bought a share of the rights that gave her claim to any film adaptations warner brothers got her to sell the rights by telling her she'd be the first actress considered for the role and whoops semantics considered and immediately rejected of course betty got the role and went on to win her second oscar for it they eventually starred together twice in the old maid and old acquaintance both shoots had their own delays and antics primarily on miriam's part but the mutual hatred ironically improved both films since it happened to work for their characters sorry perhaps part of the reason betty disliked miriam was because no one had ever dared to mess with betty on set before betty was a formidable force at the studio and as i mentioned earlier constantly pushed the leadership to give her better roles and to dismantle their unfair practices in a sense her biggest feud was with warner brothers after a series of mediocre films she accepted roles in britain that breached her contract with the studio hoping to get out of her contract or to at least end the policies that allowed them to suspend her without pay for refusing a part she sued betty lost the case but her gamble paid off and warner brothers started offering her better roles court legend olivia de havilland mounted a similar case in the united states just a few years later and won now although joan and betty's attentions were drawn elsewhere for most of their careers there were two significant instances of overlap and the first is usually what people tend to now point to as the genesis of the feud in 1935 betty davis starred in dangerous for which she won her first oscar with franchot tone betty fell for him but unfortunately he was already in a relationship with none other than joan crawford accounts differ enough that i'm not comfortable definitively stating that betty and franchot did or did not actually engage in an affair but betty's sentiment was real and joan was at least suspicious which is obviously an uncomfortable situation betty had really just made a name for herself in of human bondage and did not have nearly the same cloud as joan who at that point had been a major star for several years was it likely that this incident fostered a serious grudge between the two maybe but considering both cycled through a few husbands before baby jane including for joan franchot i'd wager not so much as a side note it was also rumored that joan was actually the one interested in betty which like who knows but regardless her sexual fluidity in general is pretty well documented nice the second and more significant overlap occurred when joan parted ways with mgm and signed a contract with warner brothers suddenly she and betty were at the same studio so in theory there was a potential for a feud to develop the press perpetually cynical about the ability of women to act like adults started rumors the second joan set foot on the lot what's funny about these articles though is most of the references to the feud claim it might exist but also fully acknowledge that the rumors barely had any legitimacy here's an example from screenland if there's a feud between betty davis and joan crawford no one except the local columnists who keep referring to it has seen any evidence both women consistently denied it and also seemed equally unsure where the rumors started betty took a guess in photo play that it was a question of resources what is all this about you and joan crawford you know she said joan asked me the same thing i know her very slightly but i think the first thing that irked her was because i have had a cameraman for years named ernie haller he's the best cameraman on the warner lot for me at least and i've always refused to make a picture without him joan had the same idea for which i can't blame her and when she found out he was busy with me it seemed to upset her that honestly is all i know there's room enough on the warner lot for both of us goodness knows and indeed ernie continued to work with both of them shot joan on mildred pierce perfectly by the way and eventually even shot baby jane jones move to warner brothers finally gave her the opportunity to play more mature roles her persona received a noirish update though maintain the glamour and her status as the object of her co-star's affections like in daisy canyon and humouresque her first role at her new home was mildred pierce for which she won her first nomination and only oscar famously at home betty had passed on the role but according to her biographer she directed most of her anger that year once again at the studio for refusing to let her star in anna and the king of siam in the meantime she continued to tackle character work like the dowdy english teacher in the corn is green and her own twin in a stolen life the only other overlap for roles i could find was 1947's possessed which was apparently written for betty but she couldn't do it because she was on pregnancy leave the truth was that even at the same studio betty and joan still didn't interact very much by 1949 betty was fed up with fighting over roles and left the studio she soon landed what was considered somewhat of a comeback role as margot channing and all about eve jones stuck around at warner brothers for a few more years but just like betty also nabbed a great role immediately after leaving their paths crossed again in 1952 when both were nominated for best actress joan for sudden fear and betty davis for the star ironically the star a film about a drunken hollywood has been was apparently inspired by the life of joan crawford joan was apparently aware of this though blamed the writers who were former friends of hers reassuring i suppose to be called a has been the year you receive another oscar nomination that year they both lost to shirley booth in comeback little sheba in another role that betty davis turned down once again separated the two found work as free agents throughout the 1950s jones filmography throughout this time is a bit stronger than betty's who called this her black period a time when she moved and lived away from hollywood acted primarily on television and took a more domestic role in her life good roles like the one they'd both become used to were not easy to come by and nobody was beating down their doors demanding a comeback it became clear that any future successes would have to be of their own making good thing that's exactly the kind of thing they were good at you you really is this a gag question i mean you want me to say something vile about her the year was 1962 and betty davis was starring in tennessee williams the night of the iguana on broadway one night she received a visitor backstage it was joan crawford and she had a pitch to make she had just read a novel called whatever happened to baby jane by henry farrell about two sisters who were former actresses one sister blanche the one who'd been a major movie star was injured in a car accident and lost the ability to walk the other sister jane who had been a vaudevillian child star but failed to make it in the movies lives with her and takes care of her slowly their relationships begin to unravel jane loses her grip on reality and things get a little violent it was right up betty's alley and joan knew it director robert aldrich was already on board thanks once again to joan who had worked with him on the film autumn leaves the trio had only to sell the idea to a studio which wasn't exactly as easy as you might expect but we'll get to that a bit later but once baby jane got the green light and the cast was announced the press went wild two major icons who no one had really heard much from recently were starring in their first picture together both women were known to be ambitious tough and opinionated so once again exactly like the time joan joined warner brothers the press immediately began to predict that the two would erupt into some massive feud feuds between actresses have always been overblown for the press encouraged by both the studios and sometimes by the actresses themselves so in a sense this isn't remarkable looking back on this moment in 2020 though it feels very cynical either the expectations of betty and joan were that low or the press understood that this is what audiences wanted from their stars and frankly i think it's a little of both feuds are interesting you're watching this video aren't you and do i think that people probably had a wacky stereotypical idea of what older actresses were like well alright mr demille i'm ready for my close-up these are the 1930s again i won it now yeah i do consider that betty davis's last three oscar nominations were for playing actresses in various degrees of mental anguish over their diminished relevance come on oscar let you and me get drunk certainly baby jane doesn't um help that stereotype but you can't say it's not a hell of a ride look i watch a lot of classic movies especially from the 30s and 40s when both betty and joan were at their prime and there is something really special about seeing them on screen together the top echelon of actresses rarely shared the screen during that period and this film lays out exactly what audiences lost because of that practice baby jane works in part because it casts both women in the logical extension of their personas joan plays the more glamorous sympathetic sister and although she's not an object of affection per se she's the star drowning in fan mail whose love stories mesmerize the neighbor next door betty returns to old tricks playing the coarse unsympathetic sister she personally crafted her ghostly vaudevillian makeup to appear stuck in the past and out of touch with reality and she acts with her entire body skulking up the stairs and dragging her feet they are two opposing forces built upon decades and decades of learned experience so that when they finally do face each other we believe in blanche the movie star and jane the made up menace so i spent however many minutes at the beginning of this video talking about how different betty and joan were in manner and approach in practice they were just completely at odds the same thing was true during production however there is practically zero credible evidence that they feuded onset now they weren't friends they weren't vibing but there is a difference between finding it annoying that say joan didn't want her boobs to look flat when she was laying down on the beach and actively disrupting the shoot because of interpersonal problems what's amazing is i can't even begin to tell you how well documented it is that production was largely fine betty and joan talked about it in interviews all the time anna lee who played the neighbor confirmed it as well they didn't like each other they didn't they never showed it they were one very well disciplined most newspaper articles acknowledged that while seemingly the entire news and gossip apparatus had predicted a brawl not much really happened they've been making quite a hullabaloo over the fact that betty davis and joan crawford went through the making of baby jane without a smidgen of temperament our own guess is that each of these volatile actresses were so busy trying to out-act each other that neither had the time nor inclination to get into personal rumpus the two stars got along well on set there were a few differences of opinion nothing in fact that couldn't be settled amicably in a few minutes betty of course you know joan that everyone is going to try to work up a feud between us joan i know dear isn't it ridiculous we're much too professional for anything like that hollywood gossips predicted instant conflagration when the two polished pros met on the set which everyone was certain would soon become a battlefield what has happened instead was a kind of wary examination of each other an intense searching out of weaknesses and strengths not for the purposes of destruction but to find out how best they could mutually support each other both profess to be puzzled at the speculation that they might not work in harmony they regarded such thoughts as aspersions on their professionalism that professionalism bit i think is key here which brings us to our favorite part of the show a brief tangent to rant about fx's feud ever since i announced the topic for this video people have been asking me what i thought about ryan murphy's 2017 miniseries feud here's the thing it's not a poorly paced show there are beautiful costumes their performances are decent although i personally thought susan sarandon's betty needed a little more fire in her belly and there are some fun references for people who enjoy pop culture from that era from a historical perspective it's a big ol mess it gets a lot of basic facts wrong and worse in my opinion presents rumors as facts without any qualifications whatsoever leaving the audience to assume that the writers did their due diligence and take the show as bible truth or fend for themselves and discover the truth on their own let's just take one paragraph of jones dialogue from the episode about the 1963 oscars as an example i have been in competition with that goddamn woman my entire career a constant battle for men for roles for magazine covers and i don't know why i was the biggest star my leading men were more attractive my pictures made more money and yet i was always made to feel inferior this paragraph is supposed to be the basis of the entire show and half of it doesn't even make sense if this monologue was meant to convey that for some reason joan misunderstood their relationship that's never clear nor does anyone around her ever challenge her there are innumerable errors like this and fabrications that seemingly come out of nowhere like betty calling joan lucille which is just such a weird pointless detail that i've never seen appear anywhere and i guess it's supposed to be a witty dig at joan even though changing her name was such a normal practice that it'd be kind of like making fun of someone for painting their nails in the oscar episode heda hopper becomes joan's accomplice and convinces her that together they can sway enough voters away from betty to affect the race oh and don't worry they get the academy's voting procedures wrong too never mind that heda hopper's actual reporting underplayed the feud and that her own readership elected betty davis actress of the year she must have been very bad at leading an anti-davis movement i mean they even included a detail found in a falsified letter written by a joan crawford meme account incredible i literally cannot go on or i will burst a blood vessel in my eye but basically feud misrepresents this entire situation in order to make the show more interesting to the point that olivia de havilland who is still kicking ass at 104 years old sued fx over the show claiming it portrayed her in a false light to sensationalize the series and honestly i get it for a show that aims to do justice to betty and jones legacies it's bizarre to me that the writers chose to conjure a world in which the most salacious unsubstantiated rumors about them are all true look i know it's just a show and this kind of thing tends to happen with any biopic or whatever and i don't think the creators had any malicious intent i know ryan murphy is a huge fan of both women and that his goal was to expose the issues they face in hollywood but i think that the sloppy execution caused him to fall into a familiar trap that doesn't actually accomplish that take for example episode 2 jack warner calls robert aldrich into his office so the two can discuss the release of baby jane warner says you gotta keep them at each other's throats you have to i'll make sure the names are in the papers that's not a problem but if you do this you'll be able to write your own ticket in this town then aldrich plants a story with head hopper that causes joan to erupt and the feud worsens the show is trying to give nuance to their relationship by making it not betty and jones fault necessarily however peel a layer of that logic back and it doesn't quite hold up many of betty and jones actions were motivated by having to navigate a patriarchal system but they did make their own decisions good and bad instead here betty and joan are helplessly manipulated as if they weren't two professional adults with decades of experience each somehow two of the most notoriously steadfast and ambitious women in hollywood history have no personal agency whatsoever then olivia de havilland and joan blondel pop in to tell us there was nothing they could do about it because i guess women's liberation well not that we could have done anything about it you know how much power women had back then exactly as much as we got now zippo well you have to remember this was before the modern women's lib movement which i admire very much away it is true that women lacked lack power in the film industry hey ryan how about hiring some female writers but by blaming a lack of institutional power it once again reinforces this idea that betty and joan were incapable of controlling themselves on set without intervention that you could just easily flip some switch and trigger a temper tantrum and it's all made worse because as i've shown almost all of these stories are rumors unambiguously reported as fact or entirely fabricated for the sake of drama in other words feud is not doing too much differently then come on oscar you and me get drunk at the end of the series susan's betty davis echoes the real betty davis and says that joan was a professional and their lives briefly intersected then she says i will not participate in your documentary you'll want me to say funny [ __ ] one-liners about crawford i won't do it well what do you think you've been doing for the last seven episodes i wouldn't piss on crawford if she were on fire tldr i think the show's thesis falls flat because it spends most of its time doing exactly what it blames the press and studios for doing amplifying the feud and manipulating the images of these women for its own benefit and that's what you missed unviewed whatever happened to baby jane opened with a wide release in october 1962 within 11 days it recovered its production costs and eventually grossed 9 million needless to say the film far surpassed anyone's expectations the marketing campaign sold the film as being in the spirit of psycho and focused on the fact that two icons finally made an appearance together the fact that betty and joan were starring in a major film that was generating oscar buzz was kind of a big deal by 1962 very few women from their peer group had maintained active and or prestigious careers some were treated to tv some gave up acting altogether but when they did appear in big films they generally had supporting roles or were in fun movies that nobody took really seriously obviously this was not for lack of trying roles that ostensibly called for casting older women often went to younger actresses angela lansbury was cast in the manchurian candidate at 37 years old as the mother of lawrence harvey who was three years younger than her and bancroft was 36 in the graduate just six years older than dustin hoffman ava gardner played betty's role in the film adaptation of knight of the iguana aging down the role for the screen by over a decade the instinct to cast younger women nearly destroyed betty and jones chances at baby jane 2. robert aldrich told the new york times three distributors read the script and looked at the budget and turned the project down two of those said they might be interested if i would agree to cast younger players in the davis crawford roles i refused for context betty and joan were about 54 at the time nicole kidman is 53. no surprise then that older women rarely appeared in the awards conversation with one exception remember that joke tina fey and amy poehler told at the golden globes a couple of years ago meryl streep's so brilliant in august osage county proving that there are still great parts in hollywood for meryl streep's over 60. that's basically what kathryn hepburn was for the 50s and 60s catherine hepburn consistently won great roles in well-respected films that earned a fair amount of rewards attention hilariously in summer time playing a woman named jane hudson obviously this would be frustrating for any actress but what made it much worse was the fact that the men in their peer group absolutely did not have this problem john wayne was older than both betty and joan and yet was one of if not the most bankable star in the country cary grant starred in charade in that touch of mink henry fonda and james stewart thrived throughout this era in films like advise and consent and anatomy of murder even worse at their primes these women had already proven that they could outperform those exact same men at the box office this was a very gross imbalance that would have been obvious to betty and joan baby jane even with a small budget was something something good to get some press and hopefully get more work the stakes were very very high and they knew that so what happens when one of them gets left behind [Music] and the winner is and bankrupt in february of 1963 the oscar nominations were announced the nominees for best actress were lee remick in days of wine and roses geraldine page and sweet bird of youth catherine hepburn in long day's journey in tonight anne bancroft in the miracle worker and betty davis in whatever happened to baby jane notice anyone missing joan crawford did her understated performance as blanche hudson went unnoticed even though to her credit the film falls apart without her ability to balance jane's eccentric energy but it's hard to leave that movie without thinking about betty davis the role is naturally flashy yet it's memorable because betty contributed such distinctive character traits the makeup the shuffling walk the childlike smile with this nomination she broke the record for the number of nominations by an actress and had the opportunity to become the first actress to win three oscars newspapers led with images of betty and catherine and proclaimed the re-emergence of 30 stars in modern pop culture only joan was nowhere to be found losing out on an oscar nomination can be an enormous blow to the ego but beyond that there are also tangible ways in which it can affect an actor's career without a nomination you might miss out on several news cycles which all serve to raise your profile and keep you top of mind for future casting opportunities for a woman who had virtually manufactured her own comeback and who faced increasingly limited options for work this was not just a snub it was also a threat joan did what she had always done to survive in the industry for decades she read the situation found an opening and seized the opportunity to center herself part one goes into a little more depth on this but basically she approached anne bancroft and geraldine paige and offered to accept the oscar for them if they won but were unable to attend the ceremony both said yes as they were starring on broadway at the time and did not want to miss any shows she also approached the ceremonies organizers and volunteered to present the best director award guaranteeing herself at least a few moments on stage going into the ceremony betty appeared to be the sentimental favorite for the win though in truth predictions varied throughout the season she was convinced she had it in the bag on oscar night she sat backstage in a dressing room with olivia de havilland as maximilian shell delivered the results and the and bancroft was at home crying and laughing surprised yet thrilled about the award as an announcement rang out on the broadcast accepting for anne bancroft miss joan crawford joan who had been in another dressing room approached the podium from the wings read anne's speech politely and walked back off stage where she posed for photographs with the other winners and an oscar that was not hers this moment reads like a personal affront to betty davis an extraordinarily petty targeted attempt to steal attention certainly the optics are not good but i think we tend to read this moment through the lens of the feud rather than in the context of the typical awards show practices all presenters and winners posed backstage that year [Music] and that had been the case for years prior it was also fairly normal to pose with an oscar you accepted on someone else's behalf in fact but betty davis is going to approach the center of the stage and accept the award for kim hunter it's betty davis still joan must have understood that this was a little different and that there would be implications for her actions given the coverage of their relationship the press had been waiting for something like this for decades and joan essentially gave them ammo to talk about it for decades to come she was too smart to make a glaring unintentional error like that no matter what the truth had been until that point the story now had real images and real hostility to substantiate the suspicion we can't know jones intentions but there's no doubt that the personal friction between the two of them contributed to her actions it's possible that she only meant to insert herself into the spotlight by any means necessary not to directly insult betty and yet even if that generous interpretation were true she still had to be okay with knowing that betty would likely be heard in the process you don't do something like that to a good friend but you might do that to someone you just kind of get along with as for betty seeing joan who she never personally liked very much accepting the oscar she believed to be hers infuriated her if a serious feud existed between betty and joan it was born that night she later wrote in her memoir when anne bancroft's name was announced i'm sure i turned white moments later crawford floated down the hall past my door i'll never forget the look she gave me it was triumphant the look clearly said you didn't win and i'm elated betty candidly blamed joan for her loss until the day she died no one actually knows if joan campaigned against betty but because betty believed that she did we can't entirely discount the idea here she is telling a story to johnny carson she pat pays new york to find people that not vote for me because i think i lost by a very few votes for jane that was whatever whatever happened to [Applause] stood with miss bancroft's oscar clutched to her bosom it had it had become hers yes she has become this she also traveled with it for one year no no no one year the pepsi cola and she told mrs bancroft that she would bathe this oscar in all the waters of the world so she got back to new york miss bancroft is still doing mother courage gave a party on the stage of mother courage after a performance one night right and gave the oscar to miss bancroft finally she got it for a year betty speaks with a certainty that i admire and find absolutely charming but i can't help but see her story here as more of a performance opportunity than an accurate account especially since she gets some basic facts wrong about the story joan's visit with anne is well documented it occurred less than a month after the oscars and mother courage barely ran a few weeks after that so a year-long romp around the world with the award would have been literally impossible she sometimes emits these details in other interviews but maintains her conviction about joan personally i find it a little hard to believe that joan crawford who the academy apparently didn't care enough about to nominate could personally influence enough people within a body of at least 2 000 members to substantially affect the vote betty's logic also assumes that voters were simply in a vacuum uninfluenced by other trends incentives or biases in part one i talk about why a voter might have been motivated to choose anne specifically but why might a voter have overlooked betty first let's take a look at how betty waged her own campaign the time between the end of production on baby jane and the beginning of her publicity tour began on an awkward note nine days after the production of baby jane wrapped betty placed a want ad in the hollywood reporter trade publication it read situation wanted 30 years experience as an actress in motion pictures mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it once steady employment in hollywood contrary to popular belief this ad was not an actual desperate plea for employment as she later explained this was a playful jab meant to ruffle some feathers a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the industry who left experienced women like her behind but as sikhov writes the ad is a prime example of how betty's sense of humor could misfire she meant the ad to be a serious joke a goof with a chip on its shoulder but hollywood took it as an inadvertent joke and betty ended up looking foolish in the eyes of fools her sense of humor revealed itself again after the release of baby jane when she began to appear as a guest on talk shows i hinted at this earlier but whatever happened to baby jane was not an easy film to finance and distribute and she loved talking about why and wherever he went with this film to raise money to make it the hollywood people would say those two old broads i wouldn't give you a dime but for him i guess the two old brawls would have been recast and uh we owe him a great deal and i i must say we are not feeling charmingly victorious for a little closer it's a delightful story and i'm sitting here in 2020 like good for her on the one hand it's gracefully self-deprecating joan didn't like the old broads line but on the other hand it's kind of another playful jab once again betty was right and had no problem asserting that the men in charge had gotten it wrong but many of those people were also voters and while we can't nor should we ever blame her for being honest we can still acknowledge that it's a risky strategy to campaign with a story that has a punchline like isn't it great how we proved you wrong still i think the largest factor contributing to betty's loss has almost nothing to do with betty herself but rather with larger trends and stereotypes the best way to understand this is to look at how the industry reacted to baby jane's success studios seeking to replicate the film's considerable box office achievements made a series of shameless rip-offs with extremely creative titles like whatever happened who had alice what's the matter with helen [Music] baby jane spawned an entirely new sub-genre of horror affectionately termed hag exploitation also known as the psycho bitty or the grand dumb guineol these films star older female actors playing mentally unstable psychotic villains combining gothic melodrama with the visceral pleasures of cheap sensational exploitation films peter shelley notes in his history of hag horror that the actress playing the grand damn guinyol had usually not worked for some time or this role would be her last starring role indeed some of the studio's most prominent leading ladies including olivia de havilland joan fontaine and barbara stanwyck reemerged to star in these films if the psycho bitty is a commentary on older women that they're prone to insanity or outburst that they're fixated on the past then it is also a meta commentary on the women who played them remember what we think about actresses come on oscar let you and me get drunk shelley observes that there is no male version of the grand jam guinyol tells us that such an idea is less believable to screenwriters and directors that these portrayals of older actresses have exploitation and the sidelining of older women in the industry all happen around the same time speaks volumes about how seriously the industry's most powerful players took these women and how much they wanted them involved this brand of misogyny ran deep in several major reviews too basley crowther the new york times resident taste maker called betty and joan formidable freaks grotesque maniacs and even our favorite misogynist dog whistles witches and shrill times review said davis gives a performance that cannot be called great acting but is certainly grand gnoll joan effectively plays the [ __ ] to betty's witch the los angeles times even called betty's nomination a macabre gag so betty davis's ironic performance of youth while fascinating and respectable enough to earn a nomination was also something to ridicule and for those critics a metaphor for the feats from which she fell both betty and joan returned to the genre so ironically these films did help them accomplish their goal to keep working but the industry had very little regard for these film's quality lindsay zolads wrote in the wringer by 1966 the movie's imitators were so widespread that mad magazine parodied the phenomenon in a piece called hack hack sweet has been or whatever happened to good taste in other words the lesson the film industry learned from whatever happened to baby jane was not wow we've been underestimating these women and we should cast them in great stuff more often it was not wow we should elevate and explore thrillers as an art form the lesson was we can cheaply reproduce this and exploit the name recognition of older women to earn a few quick bucks so as their male counterparts continue to star in major motion pictures actresses found a home in a new genre invented mostly to make them look insane neither betty nor jones received any other oscar nominations the 1963 episode fostered enough animus to make the feud real and lasting the constant jockeying for power eventually caused joan to pull out of their next film together hush hush sweet charlotte so what do we take away from all of this you know as years go by the stories grow and each person tells another person and it gets worse and worse plenty of betty davis's interviews are available on youtube she was not a shy woman and as we've learned didn't mind calling out people she didn't like or thought were wrong while her anger over the 1963 oscars certainly registers she also openly acknowledges her respect for joan as a professional in fact she is sometimes kinder to joan than she is to other stars so who's one of the worst people you know in hollywood that i worked with or that you wouldn't want to work with again if you don't you don't have to go million dollars fades on away so we know there is disdain there but i think that's as far as we safely can and should measure it i often wonder what we would think about baby jane today if it weren't for the feud no doubt it has survived in pop culture partly because of its behind the scenes stories so i guess for that i'm thankful yet i'm always trying to get back to the first time i saw baby jane before i even knew who betty davis and joan crawford were i saw it young when it was just two women performing thrillingly at face value before we used them as proxies for the itch that reality shows exist to scratch i think we can do better than the media has done for the past several decades we can take these women for who they were mistakes and all without feeding off of exaggerations for entertainment i don't buy into all the team betty team joan [ __ ] they were very different but they also had a lot in common both were remarkably hard-working women who defied the odds to build careers that spanned decades and call me crazy a youtube genio but i think that's more interesting than any feud could ever be [Music] come on

Channel: Be Kind Rewind

Views: 635,914

Rating: 4.9022064 out of 5

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Id: lWYISEEl2dI

Length: 49min 15sec (2955 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MutatedWizard]

Love this channel. She always puts out educational and entertaining material at the right moment.

[u/MisterFarty]

I guess it’s too niche (Oscars + old Hollywood + actresses doesn’t really scream YouTube stardom) but I wish this channel was more popular, her vids are terrific.