Considine - Bette and Joan The Divine Feud

BETTE AND JOAN
The Divine Feud

Copyright 1989, 2008 by Shaun Considine

All rights reserved, No part of this book my be used, reproduced or transmitted by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in brief quotations embossed in critical articles ands reviews

Originally published by E.P. Dutton in the U.S.

and Random House and Little, Brown in the United Kingdom

web site: shaunconsidine.com

The original best-selling book.
With a galaxy of new photos,
posters and a bonus section.

Bette and Joan:
The Divine Feud

Reviews

"Fascinating and vastly entertaining.all you want is more."

Time Out magazine

"A hugely entertaining chronicle - juicy, unrestrained and exhaustively researched. A movie fan's dream. A gossip aficionado's bible."

Syndicated columnist Liz Smith

"The book has the pace of a tennis match, as the narrative bounces from Crawford's career to Davis's, and back again, all told in a rip-roaring style. A definite ten."

New York magazine

"Over ten years in the writing this isn't merely a catch-penny item. It is well researched throughout and quite riveting to read. Splendid stuff!"

Film Review magazine

"Should dead coals be raked over? Ah, but these are not women, or even human beings, but glorious, impossible monsters, as deadly and unreal as the Medusa. Their story may be fact, but it is nonetheless, and irresistibly, legend. Let me shame the devil...I loved it."

Playwright Hugh Leonard

"Quite the best read I've had across the Atlantic - or anywhere else, come to that."

Actress Dame Diana Rigg

"It is one of those 'don't-put-it-down' books...fascinatingfunny, sad, tragic. it's just terrific."

Playwright Robert Anderson

"'Bette and Joan' is divine fun. Just thinking about a passage would send me into spasms of laughter - on the subway, in the office, on the street, by myself. It kept me in book pleasure Nirvana, one of those rare books you want never to end. Along with being a comic masterpiece, it is a moving and intimate portrait of two one-of-a-kind dames."

Author Donna Marie Nowak

CONTENTS

Preface

O n Saturday morning, April 14, 1973, the phone rang in my New York apartment. On the other end of the line was Bette Davis, calling from her home in Connecticut, to talk about a story I was doing on The Catered Affair, one of her favorite films. After discussing the film, I mentioned to Davis, with some apprehension, that I had seen a colleague of hers, Joan Crawford, on stage at Town hall the previous Sunday night. The news instantly aroused Bette's interest. "God!" she said, with that inimitable speech pattern. "I would have given anything to have been a fly on the wall at that thing. Tell me, how did it go!" Crawford was a little nervous at first before a live audience, I said, but she rallied. "And?" said Bette. "She spoke about working with you," I replied, "Of course she did," said Bette. "And what did Joan say?"

Being careful to step around the issue of Bette's explosive temperament (which Crawford dissected), I mentioned that Joan was laudatory, stating that she found working with Davis on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? to be a "challenge."

"Whaaat!" said Bette, her voice rising in pitch and volume. "A challenge? That bitch hated working with me on Jane; and vice versa. She was a pain in the assbefore, during, and after the picture was made."

Bette went on to discuss the differences between them. "I was the actress and she was the big Movie Star. There is a need for both in this profession, but, my dear, at times the woman could be insane!" Joan, according to Bette, was also vain, jealous, and about as stable and trustworthy as a basket of snakes.

The following Monday evening the phone rang once more in my apartment. The caller this time was Joan Crawford, who insisted that she be allowed to give her side of the fractious story. Bette was a liar, of course. She was also a bitch and a bully who put her through hell during the making of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and tried to destroy her during the production of their second, abortive film, Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

A year after my talk with the rival queens, I met Crawford at a New York social function. She was civil, almost cold. She was angry with me, I was told, because I had failed to write about her difficulties with the great beast Bette. But that wasn't my job, my assignment. Furthermore, I wrote nothing because I felt I didn't have the complete facts. One or both of the star ladies was lying about the details given. But certainly I was hooked by the situation. What movie fan wouldn't relish being caught in the crossfire of such living lusty legends? As a journalist I also felt there was a good story here. For years Davis and Crawford went to considerable lengths to downplay or deny that there was any bad blood between them. Now I knew firsthand that the feud not only existed, it was ready to erupt, bursting into full flame at the mere mention of the other star's name.

The cause of it, however, the why, when, and wherefore of their rivalry, which spanned five decades set against the backdrop of Hollywood's most golden era, would take me fourteen years to uncover.

In 1976, the year before she died, I talked with Miss Crawford again, and in 1987 to Bette Davis, specifically for this book. In the interim, extensive research was done, and interviews were conducted with many of the writers, directors, producers, costars, makeup man, and hairdressersthe myriad of people who worked with both actresses over the year. Their recall and insights on the life, the legend, the differences between two of the most illustrious and durable legends Hollywood ever created are documented on the following pages.

PART ONE

1908-1945

"Bright, ambitious, forceful,
impatient, extravagant, self
centered, generous, and
stubborn, when one Aries
challenges another Aries, they
become two battering Rams
whose horns are locked."

CARROLL RIGHTER,
ASTROLOGER TO THE STARS

T hey were born under the same signAries the Ramand in the same year1908although Davis would later swear, "Crawford is five years older than me if she's a day."

Their backgrounds were also dissimilar, Davis claimed. She came from upperNew England stock, while Crawford's roots were vague, inferior, with the possibility that her parents never married.

Bette's parents came from the small town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Her mother, Ruth Favor, "resembled a Sargent painting." Her father, Harlow Morrell Davis, was the son of a Baptist minister and a graduate of Harvard's law school. Possessed of a low tolerance for people, pranks, and sentimentality, on their wedding day the groom yelled, "Damn you! I'll get you for this," after a guest threw rice at the departing couple. On the 4th of July, their wedding night, Bette was conceived, without plan or desire. Post coitus, apparently her father went into an absolute rage when, due to a lack of water at the hotel where they were staying, his bride could not douche. "Nothing could wash me away," said Bette, born nine months later between a clap of thunder and a streak of lightning. Her birth, a critic later noted, sounded more like an entrance "from the wings than the womb."