Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
holds up also, I volunteered.
"Yes, in a strange way it does," said Crawford. "It was a good movie, but not as good as it could have been. They tricked me, you know?"
"They?"
"Bob Aldrich and Bette Davis," she said. "But let's not open that can of worms again."
"Oh, please,
let's,"
I thought, looking for a way of getting the old feud train rolling again.
"Mr. Aldrich found the book ..." I offered.
"No, he did
not,"
said Joan. "I found the book."
Crawford explained that a friend had sent her the book when it was first published, in 1961. "I read it and went out and bought three copies. I sent one to Nicholas Ray, one to Alfred Hitchcock, and the third to Bob Aldrich. He was the first to option it. He wanted me for Blanche, and he suggested Katharine Hepburn for Jane. I insisted on Bette Davis. I also brought Mr. Aldrich and Miss Davis together. Then later, for their own selfish, neurotic reasons, they teamed up against me."
Furthermore, Bette's story about her hijacking Anne Bancroft's Oscar was an outright lie. "I never campaigned against Miss Davis. The Oscar went to Anne Bancroft because she deserved it. After it was engraved, I presented the statue to Miss Bancroft in New York. It was a week or two later, and not six months or a year, as Miss Davis claimed. And I would appreciate it if you would set the record straight on this in your story."
The next day a letter, with "
JOAN CRAWFORD
" embossed on the back, arrived. Inside the blue envelope was a clipping of a newspaper photograph. It showed the star presenting the Oscar to Anne Bancroft backstage at the Royale Theater in New York, after a performance of
Mother Courage.
Over the clip, marked in ink, was the inscription—"Taken in New York, one week after the Oscars."
I forwarded the clipping to Bette Davis in Connecticut, together with an original illustration of her by artist Michaele Vollbracht, for possible use as an insert for a book she was working on. The illustration appeared on the jacket of the hardcover book
(Mother Goddamn),
but Bette preferred to ignore Crawford's clip and correction. In the years to come she would continue to tell the Oscar hijack story, until it became the established version. "It plays better that way," said Hector Arce. "Bette is a legend and a star, and she feels she's entitled to rewrite the facts as she sees fit. After all, it's life; her picture show."
*6
21
The Twilight Years
I
n 1973 the success of the Legendary Ladies at Town Hall series brought offers of work for Bette and Joan. Producer Morton Gottlieb asked Crawford to appear in his hit play
Sleuth.
It would be revised, rehearsed, and performed in a lengthy out-of-town tour before bringing Joan to Broadway. She turned it down, saying she preferred to do "the O'Neill plays ... the mothers.... I'm anxious to do something like that." She was also asked by NBC to appear as the guest-target on a Dean Martin TV celebrity roast. When told that Governor Ronald Reagan, Kirk Douglas, and Jimmy Stewart had gamely appeared and been lampooned on the show, Crawford scowled: "No! I don't think an hour of insults is funny. I don't have that much of a sense of humor about myself or my work."
Bette Davis was not as touchy about her legend. She agreed to be roasted by Dean and his guests. She also accepted a bit part as the alcoholic mother of a psychopathic killer in a TV suspense movie,
Scream, Pretty Peggy.
In March 1974, with no other offers to accept, Davis decided to play herself on a tour of theaters and auditoriums across America. She and John Springer took her one-woman question-and-answer tour to Saratoga, Princeton, Denver, and twenty-six other cities; then on to Australia, New Zealand, and England. "Is that your real hair, Miss Davis?" one fan asked in Scotland. "Yes it is [it wasn't]," said Davis. "And these are my real eyes, my real teeth, and my real tits."
Traveling with Bette as her hairdresser was Peggy Shannon, who performed the same duties for Joan Crawford for many years. "I was with Joan for fifteen years and with Bette for twelve," said Shannon.
Bette seemed not to remember that Shannon had worked with Crawford on
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
"In 1974 she needed someone for her tour, and a makeup man from
Green Acres
told her about me," said the hairstylist. "Then, when we were in London, the newspapers said that I had been with Miss Crawford for a long time."
"You never mentioned it," said Bette.
"It was work. Who cares? Why should I mention it?" said Shannon in 1988, proud to recall that she had worked on the heads of some of the most famous women in Hollywood. "I was with M-G-M and Twentieth-Century Fox during the 1950s," she said. "Stars were really stars back then. Not like the kids today—they work on one television series and they think they're stars. They don't know what a star is."
Lana Turner was a star, and Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Cyd Charisse, and Kay Kendall, all of whom Shannon helped to beautify ("We
never
used hot rollers like the stylists today; we iron-curled"). But the pinnacle for Peggy, the absolute zenith in stars, was Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
"Joan was the love of my life ... a great, great person," said Shannon. "We began together on
The Best of Everything
at Fox in 1959. We were together on
Baby Jane, Sweet Charlotte,
and throughout the 1960s. I did her for premieres, the Oscars, and for TV shows. Every Sunday when she was in Hollywood she had her facials and I would color her hair. She was very disciplined. The lady took very good care of herself. She had gorgeous skin and very good hair."
Bette had fine hair and a different personality. "She could be
firm.
But when Miss Davis wanted to have fun, she was a ball. We pulled a lot of practical jokes on people. She never spoke about Miss Crawford. And I never brought her up. I knew they didn't like each other—that was obvious. Bette said a few things about Joan to the press that weren't true; and maybe Joan spoke about Bette too. It was none of my business. When reporters would ask, 'What about their feud?' I would say, 'What feud?' I had nothing bad to say about either one. I saw none of that child abuse that Christina wrote about. The people at Paramount called me when they were doing the
Mommie Dearest
movie. They wanted to see some photographs of hairstyles I had done for Joan. I said, 'No way!' To me Joan was a walking saint. Bette was wonderful too. Both of them were very kind, very thoughtful; they made you feel like part of the family Once, when my back was broken on a movie set, Bette flew into town and insisted that I see her specialist. When I got out of the hospital, she moved in with me, to take care of me. Joan was very generous too. That's the kind of people these two ladies were. So when anyone asks me what they were like, I always say, 'They were the greatest. The best. I was very lucky to know them.'"
"A feud? Oh no.
I
couldn't ever
be bothered with anything like
that. Let's just say Joan's not
someone
I
would have any cause
to see socially. Or ever did."
—BETTE DAVIS TO
M
C
C
ALL'S
,
1974
On Bette's tour through New Zealand, John Springer was putting together an all-star cast for the movie version of the Broadway musical
Follies.
The concept was to be changed from the closing of a Broadway theater to that of a Hollywood studio. Set for the leads were Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Shirley MacLaine, and Gene Kelly, with a stellar supporting cast to be played by Debbie Reynolds, June Allyson, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
"Joan agreed to do the Yvonne De Carlo part, although her song would have been 'Broadway Baby,'" Springer told columnist Liz Smith. "Bette Davis was set to sing 'I'm Still Here,' and she was thrilled, even though she had some misgivings about working with Crawford again. All through the trip to Australia and New Zealand she would play the
Follies
album, learning the song, and you haven't heard anything until you've heard Bette sing 'I'm Still Here.'"
The project was set to go at M-G-M when producer Hal Prince had a falling-out with the studio. "He felt they were going back on promises," said Springer, "and he withdrew the whole project. He was too hurt and bitter to try another studio, and it died. But wouldn't it have been a beauty?"
Eager to resuscitate her career, in August 1974, Davis opted to return to Broadway, as the star of a big-budget musical,
Miss Moffat.
Based on her original film,
The Corn Is Green,
the role was first offered to Mary Martin. When she declined, the director, Joshua Logan, persuaded Bette to do it.
"Thank God for this play," Bette told Logan. "It's going to save me from those flea-bitten films. The last one I read they had me hanging in a closet."
During the rehearsals in New York, Logan, who had experienced that abject lesson in "planned frustration" when he tried to get Crawford to appear on Broadway in 1953, was now at the mercy of Bette's fears and belligerent defenses. Describing herself as "a klutz" when it came to intricate dancing, she asked that her choreographed steps be kept to a minimum, and that her singing voice, aged and abused from forty years of smoking and yelling at her ex-husbands, be limited to performing no more than three songs in the show. "During the rehearsals, while the rest of us were dancing and singing our little hearts out, Miss Davis preferred to stand by the piano and talk her way through the songs. I don't believe she intended to let anyone hear her sing until we opened in Philadelphia," said one of the other performers.
Out of town, faced with an inordinate number of rewrites at rehearsals, the star lashed out repeatedly at the director. "She had an aversion to the soft, a loathing for the sentimental," Logan said. "It's as though whenever she enters a room, she is compelled to use her favorite silver screen expression, 'What a dump!'"
"Logan and Emlyn Williams [the writer] were cowards," said Davis' assistant, Vik Greenfield. "She was scared and getting older and they didn't know how to handle her." During the preview performances in Philadelphia, Bette began to forget her lines and was inaudible at times. She blamed her lapses on the bad material. "I am too
big
a star to give a bad performance," she railed at Logan. Then her "system cracked," and she entered the hospital "with an old back injury." She recovered in time to perform for opening night, but the critics panned her and the play and, after more changes and rewrites, Bette decided to quit. "One night I went backstage and I saw her stance in the dressing room. I said, 'Oh, no, this is it,'" said Greenfield. "She went to bed that night, and the next morning she called me in and said, 'I'm not doing it anymore.' I said, 'Bette, you can't do this. You can't put all these people out of work before Christmas.' She looked at me and said, 'You're fired.'"
When she lost the use of her legs, Bette entered the hospital again and submitted to tests by the show's insurance doctors. They confirmed that she was indeed paralyzed from the waist down. "Everyone seemed to forget that Mother was one of the most convincing actresses alive," said daughter B.D.
"She behaved mischievously," said Joshua Logan, who was threatened with libel when he spoke out against the actress. "How could I damage her career," he asked, "when she's been doing that for thirty years?"
"Joan loved to travel for Pepsi-
Cola. Once on tour she needed a
vitamin soot. A doctor was
called to the airport. There was
nowhere for them to go but the
men's room, which was empty.
Joan bent over. 'Can you
imagine,' she told me,
'if a man had come in
and seen my bare ass?'"
—SHEILAH GRAHAM
In the spring of 1973, although she was finished in movies and television, Crawford was still an active board member of Pepsi-Cola. Her popularity and association with the soft-drink company were so established that every day stacks of mail were delivered to the company headquarters addressed to Joan Crawford, President of Pepsi-Cola. She had her own office, press representative, a secretary at home, her limo in New York, and the company jet always at her disposal when she traveled out of town. But that April the job and the benefits ended abruptly. When she turned sixty-five, she was involuntarily retired by Pepsi.
She said she learned the news from the financial pages of the New York
Times.
She would continue to draw her fifty-thousand-dollar salary as a lifetime pension, but her forty-thousand-dollar expenses, her car, her New York secretary, and the use of the company jet were discontinued.
Because of the cutback in funds, Crawford moved to a smaller apartment in her building, making do with five rooms instead of nine. The corner of one room was converted into an office, with a table and a typewriter, so the retired star could devote herself to the one remaining task that would occupy her time, the dispatch of the notes and letters to her legion of fans, friends, and new acquaintances.
"There are probably more signed and framed notes from Joan Crawford in the bathrooms of New York apartments, than there are hampers," said reporter Arthur Bell.
"She always sent out her Christmas cards the day after Thanksgiving," said Sheilah Graham. "When she received your card she sent you a thank-you note."
"Yes, those letters were very important to Miss Crawford," said Florence Walsh, her New York secretary, who continued to work part-time for Crawford. "They gave her enormous pleasure. It didn't matter if you were famous or not; everyone who wrote to her always received a reply. She felt that was their due."
In September 1974 Crawford agreed to act as a cohostess, with actress Rosalind Russell, at a book party for John Springer in New York. Wearing red chiffon, diamonds, and a light-brown wig that seemed slightly askew, the star stationed herself at the door of the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. With Rosalind Russell at her side, she personally greeted each guest, including this writer. When my name was given to Joan, she shook my hand but the tone of her voice was cool. Turning to Rosalind Russell, she said, "This is a good friend of Miss Bette Davis." I waited for the punch line, thinking she was joking. She wasn't. Grasping my hand in introduction, Rosalind Russell smiled warmly; then, raising one eyebrow, she gave a signal that suggested, "Don't pursue this right now, dear." Since Crawford had already turned to greet other arrivals, I paid my respects to Miss Russell and moved into the room.
Crawford was angry because I never wrote up her rebuttal to Bette, I was told. But I never printed Davis' account of their feud either, and later that evening, when I attempted to seek Crawford out to explain, I learned that she had left the party shortly after the last of the guests arrived. She was tired, said John Springer. She was angry, said columnist Jack O'Brien, "because her name had been put on the invitations
before
she agreed to cohostess." Rosalind Russell had another explanation. "Joan is one of the most glamorous creatures God ever put on this earth. But she gets nervous in a crowd. And she was upset because we weren't seated at the same table."
The following morning, in her hotel suite, Rosalind Russell looked at the newspaper coverage of the previous night. Her face appeared swollen from the cortisone injections she was taking for crippling arthritis. "Dear God!" said Russell to visiting
Newsday
reporter Jerry Parker. "Just look at that picture of those two old broads."