by James Spada
Crawford was well known for showering people with little daily gifts as a way to win their affection, and Bette was no exception. The second day of filming, she found flowers in her room from Joan. The next day, a bottle of perfume. Joan had tried the same tactic when she had first come to Warner Brothers from MGM in 1944. Bette had been amused by the gesture and a little puzzled, until someone told her that Joan was sexually interested in her. She sent the gifts back unceremoniously, and never was sure what Crawford’s motives had been. “How the hell do I know if Joan was a dyke?” Bette said. “I never let her get that close to me.”
This time, Bette ignored the gifts at first, but when they continued coming she wrote Joan a terse note thanking her but asking that she stop. “I won’t be able to reciprocate,” she wrote, “because I do not have time to shop.”
The note seems to have soured any possibility of a friendship between the two women. According to B.D., when Bette introduced her to Joan on the set, she extended her hand and Crawford “pulled back from me, putting her hand behind her back as if I were diseased.”
“Hello, dear,” Joan purred to B.D. “One thing… my daughters, Cindy and Cathy, are going to be on the set with me a great deal.… I would appreciate it if you would not try to talk to them. They have been very carefully brought up and shielded from the wicked side of the world. You, obviously, have not. I don’t want your influence to corrupt them. They are so sweet and innocent, you see.… Thank you. Bless you, dear.”
When Bette discovered that Joan had vodka in the Pepsi bottle she always kept at her side, she exploded. “That bitch is loaded half the time! How dare she pull this crap on a picture with me? I’ll kill her!”
In her infamous account of her childhood, Mommie Dearest, Joan’s eldest daughter Christina wrote, “Bette Davis was the consummate match for my mother’s storehouse of intimidation tricks. She was a shrewd professional and every bit as indomitable as her costar. Years later, Mother would only have to hear her name mentioned to start a tirade.”
There were no tirades as Baby Jane filming progressed at its breakneck pace through the summer of 1962. Bette and Joan, for all their animosities, were too professional, and too hungry for a hit movie, to slow production down with outbursts of stereotypical star temperament. Still, the atmosphere was often as frosty as the fifty-eight-degree temperature Crawford demanded on the soundstage. Joan needed the set so cold, Bette told friends, because she was always overheated from the vodka she nipped between takes.
And both actresses were frantic with insecurity. Joan fretted that Bette’s much flashier role would completely eclipse her performance; Bette, always jealous of Crawford’s glamour, ridiculed her comely appearance in the film. Soon they got caught in a game of one-upmanship: Bette “shoveled” on heavier and ghastlier makeup while Joan fought all efforts to make her look anything worse than a slightly faded beauty.
“Miss Crawford was a fool,” Bette felt. “A good actress looks the part. Why she insisted on making Blanche look glamorous, I just don’t know.”
“My reasons,” Joan countered, “were just as valid as hers, with all those layers of rice powder she wore and that ghastly lipstick. But Miss Davis was always partial to covering up her face in motion pictures. She called it ‘Art.’ Others might call it camouflage—a cover-up for the absence of beauty. My character in Jane was a bigger star, and more beautiful than her sister. Once you’ve been as famous as Blanche Hudson was, you don’t slip back and become a freak like Miss Davis preferred to see her character. Blanche also had class. Blanche had glamour. Blanche was a legend.”
“Blanche was a cripple!” Bette snorted when told of Joan’s remarks. “She was a recluse. She never left: the house or saw anybody, yet Miss Crawford made her appear as if she lived in Elizabeth Arden’s beauty salon.”
As this struggle to establish dominance escalated, Joan and Bette both began to call Aldrich every night at home. “Did you see what that bitch did to me today?” Joan would wail. As soon as Aldrich finished with Joan, Bette would call. “What did that bitch call you about?” she would demand. According to Aldrich’s son Bill, “My dad had to spend an awful lot of time trying to keep them happy.”
“Mother was on the phone to Aldrich for at least an hour every night,” B.D. recalled. “She would come home, take off her makeup, then, with hair flying all over the place, she would sit in her giant bed, in her master bedroom, with her papers all around her, and the phone. We would have to bring her dinner to her on a tray; then she would call Aldrich. She’d rehash everything that happened on the set that day, that Aldrich had to apologize for—all the slights she suffered that were unfair—and the terrible things Joan had done to her, which he would have to prevent her from doing the following day.”
“First one, then the other,” Aldrich said. “I could rely on it every night. They were like two Sherman tanks, openly despising each other.”
If there wasn’t a loud, raucous, public feud between these two grandes dames, there was a subtle and insidious one. Each woman tried to vex the other, put her off her stride, adversely affect her performance. As Joan acted a solo scene, Bette turned to Walter Blake and said, loudly enough so that Joan could hear, “She can’t act, she stinks!” Afraid that Joan would storm off the set, Aldrich piped up, “I’ve got a terrible headache. We’ve got to get through this scene.” When she finished, Joan pulled Aldrich aside. “Did you hear what she said about me?”
Another scene, one of the script’s most harrowing, called for Jane to kick Blanche senseless on their mansion’s tiled floor. To obtain the proper sound effects, Bette first viciously kicked a dummy out of camera range. Then she repeated the shot with Joan, feigning the blows. She performed the stunt flawlessly—except for one kick that grazed Joan’s head.
“I barely touched her,” Bette insisted, but Hedda Hopper reported that she had “raised a fair lump on Joan’s head.” Crawford got her revenge a few days later as Jane hauls the half-dead Blanche off her bed and drags her into the hallway. It was a difficult scene, and according to Aldrich, “Crawford wanted Bette to suffer, every inch of the way.”
Just prior to action, Joan strapped a lead-lined weight lifter’s belt around her waist, adding considerably to her heft. “It was one continuous take,” the screenwriter Lukas Heller recalled. “Bette carried her from the bed across the room and out the door. Then, as soon as she got in the hallway, out of the camera’s range, she dropped Joan and let out this bloodcurdling scream.”
“My back! Oh, God, my back!” Bette shrieked. Seemingly oblivious of Bette’s agonies, Joan stood up, and as a small smile of satisfaction spread across her face, walked elegantly off the set.
Joan had one last laugh on Bette. As Blanche nears death from starvation, there was no way Joan could look anything but awful, and her makeup reflected that. But Bette noticed that Joan’s bosom grew fuller each day. “Christ!” she bellowed to B.D. “You never know what size boobs that broad has strapped on! She must have a different set for each day of the week!… She’s supposed to be shriveling away while Baby Jane starves her to death, but her tits keep growing! I keep running into them like the Hollywood Hills!”
During the last week of filming, Bette pulled Walter Blake aside and asked him, “When is this goddamn picture gonna end?”
“It’s supposed to wrap this Friday night,” Blake assured her. “Why?”
“I want to go to bed with Bob Aldrich.”
“But he’s married!” Blake sputtered.
“You old-fashioned sonofabitch,” Bette laughed. “What’s the matter with you? What the hell do I care if he’s married?”
Bette had convinced herself, B.D. recalled, that Aldrich “was madly in love with her and couldn’t stand Joan.” Apparently Bette felt it more honorable to sleep with the director at the end of filming, rather than at the beginning, as Joan had preferred.
“I’m going to throw a big party the last day of filming,” Bette told
Blake. “I want everybody w
ho worked on the picture to be there. And I want you to be certain that Bob shows up.” The clear implication, the producer knew, was that Bette planned to seduce Aldrich that night.
Aldrich wanted nothing to do with Bette’s romantic fantasy, and he used the heavy rain the evening of the party as an excuse not to go. Bette, however, wasn’t about to let her prey off the hook that easily. Amid more than a hundred guests (they did not include Joan Crawford, who, Walter Blake says, had “high-tailed it back to New York”), Bette kept asking Blake, “Where’s Bob?”
“I don’t know, Bette.”
“Well, call him, for crissakes!”
Blake did as he was told. “Do I have to go through with this?” Aldrich pleaded.
“We’ve got to keep her happy, Bob. You don’t want her getting her nose out of joint and refusing to do publicity or something. Come to the party. You can finesse things.”
Aldrich relented, but when he got to Bette’s house his car became mired in mud. He honked his horn and Blake ran out to his boss’s little sports car. “I’m going back!” Aldrich called out through the driving rain. “This is ridiculous! Find somebody to take me home.”
Frantic, Blake looked back toward the house. “But what about her)”
“You take care of her,” Aldrich responded, and rolled up the window.
If Bette was disappointed by Aldrich’s lack of sexual interest in her, she was greatly encouraged by the word-of-mouth on Baby Jane. Even in rough cut, it was clear that the picture was good, the performances were vivid, and that the picture had a strong chance to be a blockbuster. Confident that she was on the cusp of a major comeback, Bette approached Jack Warner for a $75,000 loan against her share of the film’s profits so that she could buy a New England-style cottage at 1100 Stone Canyon in the exclusive enclave of Bel Air. When Warner saw the picture, he wrote out a check. Bette christened her new home Honeysuckle Hill.
Back in Hollywood permanently, and certain that her star was again on the ascent, Bette was emboldened to announce to the motion picture industry—in a unique, provocative way—that she was ready for more work. On the morning of September 21, readers of the motion picture bibles Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter raised their eyebrows when they saw a help-wanted ad accompanied by a photo of Bette Davis:
Situation Wanted, Women: Mother of Three—10, 11 & 15—divorcee. American. Thirty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway.) Bette Davis c/o Martin Baum, G.A.C. References upon request.
For an investment of $500, Bette’s ads brought her enormous publicity, but not all of it was positive. Her associates knew of her sometimes sardonic sense of humor, and saw the ad as vintage Davis cheek. But others were stunned by what they perceived as a washed-up former great begging for work. The truth lay somewhere in between, and Bette’s comments at the time reflected both sides. “The ad was tongue-in-cheek,” she told the press, “but it was a deep dig as well. My career was not in jeopardy; if I was truly unemployed, I could never have taken the advertisement.”
Four days later, Bette spoke to the Hollywood Women’s Press Club, and admitted that she had placed a lot of stock in the advertisement: “I have flung down the gauntlet.… I am back with a vengeance.… I may fail in my attempts to regain my place in the sun, but I do ask for the chance to prove whether I can or can’t.”
Less than a month later, her prospects looked good. Baby Jane was previewed at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, and Boxoffice Magazine sensed a phenomenon in the making. The picture, their critic thought, was “a memorable movie-going event… the applause was so tremendous at times it was difficult to hear the dialogue. Both actresses give nothing less than Oscar-winning performances.” Word spread that Baby Jane was a stunning comeback for both these movie legends, and when a second screening was held in New York, the crush of fans was so thick that it took Joan Crawford thirty minutes to get from the theater lobby to her car.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? opened on November 6 in a national saturation booking. Overnight, the picture became a sensation, the movie everyone had to see. The film earned back its production cost in just eleven days, catapulting Joan and Bette back to the top of the heap—and back in the money as well.
While audiences—especially young viewers—loved the movie, it sparked fierce controversy among some critics whose memories of Bette and Joan were locked into Dark Victory and Mildred Pierce. The reviews ran the gamut from raves to harsh put-downs.
“Baby Jane is one of the best shockers since Psycho,” Harrison Carroll wrote in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “Robert Aldrich has extracted the utmost in shudders from this tense thriller. It makes the flesh crawl.” For Saturday Review, Arthur Knight raved that “Baby Jane achieves its goal with something breathlessly close to perfection. It is a shocker, and at the same time a superb showcase for two of Hollywood’s most accomplished actresses. Scenes that in lesser hands would verge on the ludicrous simply crackle with tension—or, as in the shots of Miss Davis dancing raptly on a crowded beach, they are filled with unbearable pathos.”
Most of the naysayers were concentrated in New York. The Daily News gave it just two and a half stars out of a possible four and questioned the taste and judgment of Davis and Crawford for accepting such an “unworthy” vehicle. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times labeled Bette and Joan “a couple of formidable freaks” and added that the picture “…does not afford either the opportunity to do more than wear grotesque costumes, make up to look like witches and chew the scenery to shreds.”
When B.D. saw the picture, she turned to Bette and said, “This time you’ve gone too far, Mother.” But at least one of Bette’s associates thought she wasn’t acting at all. Her former secretary, Bridget Price, told Virginia Conroy after she saw the film that this was “the true Bette—screaming, laughing hysterically and generally being as bawdy as possible.”
The most perceptive of the critics was Andrew Sarris in Movie magazine, who predicted, “Like Psycho, Baby Jane seems destined to be seen and not honored.” The comparison was apt. While Baby Jane wasn’t in the same league as the Hitchcock classic of two years earlier, both films had been crafted on a limited budget by a sure-handed director who wasn’t afraid to limn some delicious moments of black humor out of a gothic horror story. Both films broke box-office records even as they polarized the critics.
Where Baby Jane differed most from the story-driven, delicately acted Psycho was in the staggeringly over-the-top performance of Bette Davis. With her face caked with chalky-white makeup, her eyes ringed in heavy black mascara, her wig a frowsy mass of ringlets, Bette attacked the role of Jane Hudson with all the strength, courage, vigor, and abandon that only a cinematic artist of her genius could muster. Sloppy, bellicose, and bitchy, she slouches defiantly through the first few scenes in a flatfooted walk she told a friend she modeled on her sister Bobby’s. In many ways her Jane is not unlike what the Mildred Rogers of Of Human Bondage might have turned into had she lived long enough.
Bette delineates Jane’s mercurial emotional shifts with acuity. She is a vile harridan one moment, a simpering, terrified child the next. Hateful, she nonetheless evokes real sympathy when she sees her haggard, grotesque face come into sharp focus in the mirror—perhaps for the first time—in the midst of one of her pathetic vaudeville flashbacks.
Crawford’s performance, far subtler, is outstanding as well, especially considering what a passive victim Blanche must have seemed on paper. Her almost masculine face and keenly expressive eyes give Blanche an inner strength that would have been missing with most other actresses and that makes her growing dependence on Jane all the more pathetic. As one critic observed, Joan’s performance provided “the eye of the hurricane” around which Bette stormed. One actress was fire and wind and fury, the other granite. Together they created an unforgettable team.
Flush with the movie’s success (she called it “a
miracle” and “one of the greatest hits that ever lived!”), Bette threw herself with tremendous gusto into Baby Jane promotion. After the film’s publicist suggested that some of the public might think she really looked like Jane, she decided to embark on a grueling three-day personal appearance tour that took her by bus to seventeen neighborhood theaters in the New York City suburbs. She appeared on stage with B.D., raffled off Baby Jane dolls, and accepted a frenzy of public adulation she hadn’t experienced since the 1940s. (B.D.’s brief performance in the film, stiff and awkward, proved that acting talent isn’t always hereditary.)
Reveling in the role of underdog, Bette loved to tell the story of how difficult it had been for Bob Aldrich to raise money to make Baby Jane. “Everybody in Hollywood told him not to make a picture with two old broads!” she cackled on national television. The next day she received a telegram from Joan Crawford: “Please do not refer to me in that manner in the future.” Crawford, who professed to “hate this fucking picture,” stayed home, but her lack of support for the film hardly mattered: when all was said and done, Joan made over $1 million in Jane profits and Bette nearly $600,000. (The discrepancy kept Bette in a stew for years.)
On February 25, 1963, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? received five Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actor for Victor Buono as the fat, pasty mama’s-boy piano player Jane ropes into helping her with her comeback; Best Black and White Cinematography (Ernest Haller); Best Costumes (Norma Koch); Best Sound—and Best Actress for Bette, her first nomination in ten years.
