Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (38 page)

AP reporter Bob Thomas was also treated to an act of sweetness and compatibility between the two. "A convincing performance," he called it. "The display of felicity persuaded everyone, perhaps even themselves. But it couldn't last. Inevitably, the spirit of competition entered into everything. They competed in their interviews, in their performances, in their relationships with the cast and the crew."

By week number two, although the two stars were still pros in front of the camera during the day, at night their fangs began to show.

"My dad had to spend an awful lot of time trying to keep them happy," said Bill Aldrich. "But he never took sides. Luckily he had worked with some very tough guys in his time, so he played it right down the middle with the two ladies. He was just as tough as they were. Otherwise I don't think he would have survived."

When the director arrived home at night, Crawford would call. "Did you see what that (bleep) did to me today?" Joan would say. As soon as he hung up, the phone would ring again. This time it was Bette calling. "What did that (bleep) call you about?" she would ask.

"Mother was on the phone to Aldrich for at least an hour every night," said B.D. "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. Then she'd go into discussing the next day's scenes and how they were really going to fix Joan tomorrow. And I always had this funny image of Joan Crawford calling Aldrich and saying the exact same things."

"First one, then the other," said Aldrich. "I could rely on it every night. They were like two Sherman tanks, openly despising each other."

Bette felt that Joan was deliberately trying to upstage her by not adapting to the pace of her performance. While she barked out such character lines as "You
miserable
bitch!" Joan would respond with an air of heavenly grace, as if she were performing in a sweet Noel Coward drawing-room play.

"Bette had a certain tempo to her lines," said Bob Aldrich, "which Joan wouldn't respond to. She had her own, softer rhythm, which meant that when she came off her lines and Bette came in, Bette would have to slow down."

"This is not a fairy tale, for chrissake," Davis said to Aldrich at one point. "Can't she at least snap back at me?"

"I will try, dear Bette, I will try," said Joan the movie star.

"Oh, brother!" said Bette the actress.

"Crawford never reacted to anything," said Lukas Heller. "She sat in her wheelchair or in bed and waited for her close-ups. As the camera got closer, she would widen those enormous eyes of hers. She considered that acting."

According to Aldrich, there were also problems over the makeup the two stars wore for their roles in the film. Bette went to extremes with her cosmetic applications. "I wanted to look outrageous, like Mary Pickford in decay," she said. "It was my idea to wear the ghastly-white base, scads of black eye-shadow, a cupid's-bow mouth, and the beauty mark." It was Crawford's hairdresser, Peggy Shannon, who suggested that Bette add more layers each day. "I had worked with the extras in those Technicolor musicals at M-G-M," said Shannon. "We would give them these gorgeous faces. They were so in love with the way they looked, they never washed their faces. You would see them days later walking down La Brea Avenue with the original makeup still on. Each day they just added more. I told Bette that. She loved the idea. 'Yes,' she said, 'that's it! I'll put it on with a shovel every day.'"

As Bette became more hideous, Crawford insisted on improving her looks. When her original makeup tests were done, she fought with Bob Aldrich. "She loathed the makeup he suggested she wear," said Joan's makeup artist, Monte Westmore. "He wanted Joan to be horrendously ugly like Bette. For the test, I had to put huge lines under her eyes, and the shadows on her face made her look like she had jowls. She looked rotten, like she had been on dope. Having been a glamour queen all her life, it upset her enormously to look like that. That was his concept, and we tested that way but Joan would not approve the tests. So a compromise was reached; they met each other halfway."

"Miss Crawford was a
fool,"
said Bette Davis. ''A good actress looks the part. Why she insisted on making Blanche look glamorous, I just don't know."

"I am aware of how Miss Davis felt about my makeup in
Baby Jane,"
Crawford said in 1973. "But my reasons for appearing somewhat glamorous 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 any real 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 Davis argued, "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."

Ernest Haller, the cinematographer, had photographed Bette in
Jezebel
and
Mr. Skeffington;
and Joan in
Mildred Pierce
and
Humoresque.
On
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
he was told to forget the past: to photograph the characters, not the stars. "If I lit either of them this way ten years ago they'd have my head," he said. When asked on the set to choose his favorite star, the cinematographer diplomatically replied, "In terms of sheer beauty, the most lovely face I ever photographed was Hope Hampton."

According to the movie's editor, Michael Luciano, both stars saw the rushes for the first few days, then stayed away.

"Why do I have to look so damn old?" Crawford said after viewing the early dailies. "It's like I have a grandmother playing my part."

"She started crying and crying and crying that first week," said Vik Greenfield. "And Bette in exasperation finally said, 'Joan, if you're so unhappy with this film, I'll play your part and you'll play mine.' With that, Crawford broke down again and wept: 'I can't play
her.
She's twice as ugly.'"

Bette also sobbed when she first saw herself as Jane. Then she complained there were too many flattering close-ups of Joan.

"There were far more close-ups than the script called for," Ernest Haller agreed.

"Mother had a tendency to find many things wrong," said B.D. Hyman. "She became so hysterical at the rushes she stopped going. But she never stopped complaining about Joan and her tricks."

B. D., who had a small role in the film, had her own memorable encounter with her mother's rival. On the first day she was introduced to Joan Crawford, the star pulled back her hand "as if I were diseased."

Pointing to her "twin" daughters, Cindy and Cathy, who were sitting quietly on the sidelines wearing matching outfits and knitting, Crawford asked B.D. not to talk to the girls, ever. "They have been carefully brought up and shielded from the wicked side of the world," said Joan, "and you obviously have not. I don't want your influence to corrupt them."

B.D.'s mouth "fell open." When she repeated the tale to Bette, the star raged. "How dare she pull that crap with me. I'll kill her. That bitch is loaded half the time."

Joan spiked her Pepsi with vodka, Davis claimed. "She had that bottle by her elbow every
minute.
When one was finished her secretary would bring her another. Everyone
knew
what was in it."

"She used to drink 'white water' on
Autumn Leaves,"
said Bob Sherman. "It was a paper cup filled with vodka. She'd start drinking it after noon and continue throughout the day and night."

"Bob Aldrich liked to drink Coke out of a paper cup," said Phil Stern. "When he had a case of the stuff brought in, Joan had a Pepsi vending machine set up. Every time his back was turned, she used to throw out his Coke and replace it with Pepsi. One day, when they were casually going over the script, out of nowhere he said, 'Furthermore, Joan, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop filling my goddamn paper cup with Pepsi.'"

But Pepsi was good for you, Joan told everyone. "It helped indigestion and irregularity, and it was good for tired feet." Taking her slippers off, she would demonstrate, rolling the Pepsi bottle under each foot twenty times. "It relaxes the tootsies and keeps your ankles thin," she claimed.

"You hang around that woman long enough," said Bette, "and you'll pick up all
kinds
of useless shit."

Goodbye, Norma Jean

Although she was careful about saying anything nasty concerning costar Bette during the making of
Baby Jane,
Joan Crawford was not shy in chastising two other leading ladies of the day—Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.

In June, when Twentieth-Century Fox laid off two hundred workers due to the thirty-million-dollar production costs and delays on
Cleopatra
and
Something's Got to Give,
Crawford felt it was time for her to rap both stars on the knuckles again. "Miss Taylor is a spoiled, indulgent child, a blemish on public decency," said Joan.

"It gets worse and worse with Marilyn," said director Billy Wilder. "It used to be you'd call her at 9
A.M.
and she'd show up at noon. Now you call her in May and she shows up in October."

Crawford, it seemed, had been silently seething at Monroe since November 1960, when Clark Gable had died. His heart attack, two days after the completion of
The Misfits,
had been brought on by the grueling hot sun in Nevada, and by Marilyn's chronic lateness, Crawford believed. So when the blond star was fired by Twentieth-Century Fox in July 1962, Joan was delighted. "I was proud to be a part of this industry when Marilyn was fired," she told Joseph Finnigan of UPI. "I don't think she has a friend in this town, because she hasn't taken the time to make any. And the same with Liz. She's a taker, not a giver. She deserves the same as Marilyn, but nobody has guts enough to fire her. But she'll get it. Liz can get what Liz wants only for so long."

On Sunday morning, August 5, Crawford was at home, immersed in her weekly ritual of facials, manicures, and hair tinting, when the phone rang. It was answered by her maid. The caller was a reporter from the Associated Press. He spoke of Marilyn Monroe, who earlier that morning had been found dead in her bed. Her body was on the way to the city morgue, and the reporter wanted a quote from Joan. Gesturing wildly to her maid to hang up, Joan immediately called George Cukor, who had worked on Monroe's recently aborted Fox film,
Something's Got
to
Give.

"Joan came to my house that evening," said Cukor. "She was in bad shape. She had been drinking. She was very angry. I thought at first she was angry at me. She kept saying, 'Damnit, George, this shouldn't have happened! Something should have been done!' I felt she was being a hypocrite, as were many others in town. People who were nasty to Marilyn when she was alive, with good reason perhaps, were now gathered in a weeping circle. Eventually I said to Joan, 'What is this? You never liked Marilyn.'

"Joan answered, 'Yes! You're right. She was cheap, an exhibitionist. She was
never
a professional, and that irritated the hell out of people. But, for God's sake, she needed help. She had all these people on her payroll. Where the hell were they when she needed them? Why in hell did she have to die alone?'"

"I hate this f—picture, but I
need the money, and if it goes
over I'll get a nice percentage of
the profits."

—JOAN CRAWFORD TO
WRITER ROY NEWQUIST

As filming of
Baby Jane
continued, embellishments to the characters and plot were added by both stars. While Blanche was being starved to death by her evil sister, Joan lost weight in some areas of her body. As the hollows in her cheeks grew deeper and her waist grew smaller, her breasts became larger. "Christ!" said Bette. "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, but her tits keep growing. I keep running into them, like the Hollywood Hills."

Famished from hunger, in one scene Joan was to wheel herself to Bette's bedroom, where she finds some chocolates hidden in a drawer and proceeds to gorge herself. Averse to chocolate, Joan, prior to the filming of the scene, had her maid substitute "tiny chunks of chopped meat" in the candy box. Unaware of the substitute, Bette Davis, during a break in filming, reached for one of the fake bonbons, popped it into her mouth, began to chew then gagged.

"Christ!" said Bette.

"Protein, Bette, protein," said Joan. "It's good for you."

"Balls!" said Bette.

In the script, another unsavory item was added to the invalid's menu. "By the way, Blanche," said Bette in the setup, "I was cleaning the bird's cage when it escaped and flew away."

That day, for lunch, Joan was served the dead bird, laid out on a bed of pineapple rings.

Columnist Sidney Skolsky said it was Bette who suggested the next entrée and contributed the teaser line "By the way, Blanche, there are rats in the cellar."

"I am not sure if it was in the original script," said writer Lukas Heller.

"Bette proposed that, instead of a dead parakeet, they substitute a dead rat," said Skolsky. "Aldrich called the prop man, and a rat was found."

Crawford, unaware of the switch, lifted the silver serving cover and "screamed loud and clear, then fainted," while Bette cackled loudly in the background.

"When I was at the Plaza Hotel in New York some months later, I gave a big cocktail party," Bette told this writer, "and I asked them to serve the pâté in the shape of a rat. When my guests lifted the serving cover, they were
horrified.
I laughed myself silly. It was a
wonderful
idea."

During the third week of filming, Bette's and Joan's respective autobiographies were released. "Sisters under the celluloid ... Hollywood's most bona-fide dazzlers," was how Bob Downing of
Variety
described them. The books were accurate reflections of the two stars' personas, the reviewer believed. Crawford's was sleek and shimmering "with scarcely a jarring note," while Bette's had "flashes of venom.... It is the truer reflection of a human being."

Joan had the makings of a good book in her, said Bette, "but this
isn't
it"; which prompted Crawford to observe that her rival's memoirs were depressing—due largely to the lack of men in her life. "Poor Bette," said Joan. "It appears she's never had a happy day—or night—in her life."

"Whaaaatt!"
said Bette on reading this. "I've had affairs; not as many as her, but outside of a cathouse, who has?"

During a joint interview with reporter Joe Hyams, when Joan appeared with her book under her arm and placed it on the table in front of her, Bette excused herself, went to her dressing room, and returned with her book. When the Hyams piece appeared, he was obliged to feature both books, on either side of his column. Joan then proceeded to get herself booked, solo, on a local TV show. The afternoon it was scheduled to be shown, she asked Bob Aldrich if she could watch it at work. "Bob Aldrich had a portable TV brought to the soundstage," said Bob Gary. "We all sat around this big oval table to watch the show. There was a chair for Joan, and one for Bette, and in between them Bette placed a chair for her
Baby Jane
doll. When the show began, Bette got up and went to a corner of the room where a phonograph was set up. As soon as Joan appeared on the TV, Bette turned on the phonograph and began to play her
Baby Jane
song ("I've Written a Letter to Daddy"). While Joan was trying to watch herself on TV; Bette was dancing and singing in the corner, as loud as she could. I've never seen her be that far-out rude to Joan before. Bob Aldrich is sitting there, being quiet. He is walking on eggs the whole time. And Joan is a model of control. Anyone else would haul off and belt Bette."

"Mother would have
loved
a confrontation with Joan. But Crawford was too smart for her games," said B.D. Hyman.

"You could never lay a glove on Joan Crawford," Bob Sherman believed. "She came from M-G-M and Louis B. Mayer. When she didn't like someone on a picture, she would go to Uncle Louis and say, 'Cut his balls off, Uncle Louis. Or else I'm going to be unhappy.' And he would do her dirty work."

By the fourth week of shooting, Bette had had it up to her famous eyeballs with Joan's ladylike posturing and her pretense of infinite patience. "Bette came from Warner Brothers," Bob Sherman continued. "Unlike Joan, she was a very straight-on lady who wouldn't go behind your back. She'd kill you right upfront. Once during the movie she took off on me and hit me real hard."

This was the day Bette filmed the sequence standing in front of the rehearsal mirror. "She sees herself for the first time as Baby Jane and realizes what a hideous mess she is and screams," said Sherman. "When it was over, she seemed upset, a little uptight. We were standing outside her dressing room and, to comfort her, I decided to remind her that the next day she was going to work on the scene where she grabs a hold of Joan and batters her on the music-room floor. I threw my arm around her and said, 'Oh, don't worry about it, Bette, tomorrow you'll get the chance to kick the brains out of Joan.' Suddenly she pulled back and said to me, 'Oh, you think I'm
pretending
to be upset? You think that I'm being a phony like
that
cunt?' And she proceeded to call me every dirty name she could think of."

The door to Crawford's trailer was open during Bette's tirade. "Joan was in there listening," said Sherman. "And then I realized what Bette was doing. She was yelling at me but tearing off in a tangential way at Crawford. She couldn't do it directly to Joan, because Joan never gave her a chance. So I got it with both barrels blasting, and while she was screaming at me, out of the corner of my eye I could see Crawford's door slowly closing. Joan heard everything. Eventually, to stop Bette, I said, 'I'm sorry you feel this way, because I like you.' If I said, 'I respect you,' she would have cut my head off. But 'like' was a better word, because how can you yell at someone who likes you? She said, 'Oh, come on in,' and we went into her trailer and had a drink."