Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (2 page)

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 ass—before, 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 hairdressers—the 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

 

1

"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 sign—Aries the Ram—and in the same year—1908—although 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 upper–New 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."

Joan Crawford's birth by comparison was tranquil, and somewhat soft-focus in recall, as was the wont of many self-created Hollywood stars of yore. The exact year was said to be 1904, although Crawford preferred 1908, when certificates of birth first went on file in San Antonio, Texas. Her father was Thomas LeSueur. He was French Canadian, a laborer, tall, with dark hair and deep-set eyes, which Joan inherited. Her mother was "peasant Irish" and part Scandinavian, with lovely auburn hair and a lack of affection for Joan. "She worshipped Daisy, my older sister," she said. "When Daisy died, mother transferred her affection to Hal, my older brother. When I was born a year later, she didn't care whether I lived or died." Her father seemed more loving. "He held me in his arms when I cried, and soothed my pain with soft touches and whispers," she remembered. When she was ten months old, Thomas LeSueur deserted his family. "He ran off with a stripper from a Galveston waterfront bar," said Bette Davis in her memoirs. A second man soon replaced him—Daddy Cassin. He adored Lucille, as she was called then, and she believed for the longest time he was her true father. When she was eleven, he too deserted the family. "Being abandoned so often traumatized Joan," said writer Adela Rogers St. Johns. "She spent the rest of her life looking for a father—in husbands, lovers, studio executives, and directors." When she found the ideal candidate, Joan felt safe, secure, validated. In time she expected them to leave, to reject her. When they didn't, she grew suspicious, then resentful, and found ways to make them depart.

"Why waste time hating your father, when he had a father who had a father before him?" asked the more pragmatic Bette.

Describing herself as an amiable child, wreathed in smiles, Bette said her first word was "Papa." Her father's affection was minimal, however. "He despised babies, small children, displays of affection, and small talk with
anyone,"
said Bette. A constant smoker and an intellectual snob, he also bequeathed to her his brains and aptitude for self-preoccupation. When she was eighteen months old, her sister, Barbara, was born. Enamored at first, Bette soon asserted her position over the younger child. Finding the baby asleep in
her
crib, Bette lifted her out and dumped her face down on the nearby sofa. "I like Dolly, but I don't want Dolly
here,"
Bette explained. Jealous of her sister's abundant curls, Bette would later give the infant a haircut, leaving her head "cut in scallops."

Crawford as a child also experienced sibling rivalry. Small, dark, and defiant, she envied the popularity of her brother, Hal, who was tall, fair, and popular. The contrast between the two was apparent to many, who questioned whether they were really brother and sister. Joan had doubts too, telling a reporter years after, "Mother shacked up with so many men that Hal could have been my half-brother." Nicknamed Billie because she was a tomboy, she learned to fight at an early age. "The slightest slur or insult in the school playground and she would attack."

When she was six, Crawford was introduced to the wonderful world of show business. Father number two, Henry Cassin, operated a vaudeville theater in Lawton, Oklahoma, where the family lived. Each day after school Billie Cassin ran to the theater and stood in the wings, watching the comics and dancers perform. "They were third-and fourth-rate vaudevillians," she said, "but to me they were the most exciting people on earth." Hooked by the glamour and attention at the theater, she began to skip classes at school, until word of her truancy and poor grades reached her mother. When Billie arrived home one evening, her mother was waiting behind the kitchen door with what in time became known as "Billie's stick." It was a switch, cut from a maple tree. When it was applied rapidly and frequently to Billie's bare arms and legs, it left large, ugly red welts on her skin. She was warned to stay clear of the theater and not to talk to lowlifes—advice that Billie ignored. "If she told me not to do something without explaining why, I'd do it anyway," she said.

"Tell me,
'No,
you cannot or should not do this,' I would say
'Watch!,'
then do it," said the equally stubborn Bette.

When Crawford was nine, she saw her first motion picture,
Little Lord Fauntleroy,
starring her future mother-in-law Mary Pickford. "I gasped when the picture show began," she recalled. "I was immediately captured by the story and by little Mary. I thought she was so brave and beautiful." But it was the magic of the moving pictures that captivated Billie the most. She had so many questions. Why were the people larger than life? Why was it that she could see them but they couldn't see her? "They led such adventurous lives," she said. "They never seemed bored or sad for too long, and they always had happy endings." And where did the performers go when the picture ended, she wondered, desperate to go with them. "Once, when little Mary looked into the camera and waved goodbye, I wanted to jump up and yell, 'Take me with you.' I wanted to be her best friend, to be a part of her life. I really believed if I could be 'up there,' with those people on the silver screen, that my life would be perfect too—that I'd never be unhappy again."

Bette Davis was about the same age when she saw her first film. It too starred Mary Pickford. And though she wept at "its purple situations," she had no urge to jump up on the silver screen and exchange places with little Mary. Confident and secure, Bette knew she was the star of her own universe. She always felt special, she said, believing that as a child "the Finger of God was directing the attention of the world to
me."

Christened Ruth Elizabeth Davis, she changed her name to Bette when she was five, inspired by Balzac's
Cousin Bette.
When her father ridiculed the affectation, she kept the name for good. Her raucous laugh also offended the man, who offered her one dollar if she could learn to laugh like a lady. She never collected. At seven, as she and her mother and sister, Barbara, left for a vacation in Florida, her father bid a permanent goodbye to his family. When told by Mrs. Davis that there was to be a divorce, young Barbara burst into tears and Bette laughed. "Good," she said, "now we can go to the beach and have another baby." Years later she would call this her Pyrrhic victory. "Of course I replaced my father," she said. "I became my own father and everyone else's."

When Billie Cassin was eleven, her childhood ended. Charged but acquitted of embezzling gold, her stepfather was forced to give up his vaudeville theater. The family moved to Kansas City, where they ran a third-rate hotel for transients. When the hotel failed, Cassin skipped town. His deserted wife found work as an agent in a laundry, with one room at the back of the shop to house her family. Forced to choose between keeping her favorite, Hal, or her rebellious daughter, she chose the boy. Billie was sent to live at Saint Agnes's, a Catholic boarding school run by nuns. For free room and board, she was expected to work in the kitchen and dining room. "The nuns were strict and the other girls were snobs," she said. "They looked down on me and called me a servant." After two years she left the school. Her mother could no longer afford the tuition, Joan said, although her classmates later claimed Billie was expelled for theft and disobedience. "She stole money and possessions belonging to the other girls," one former classmate told the Kansas City
Star.

From Saint Agnes's, Billie moved back into the laundry, to sleep in a makeshift alcove at the rear of the store. When her mother took in a new lover, Billie was sent to Rockingham Academy, a boarding school outside the city. Again, for free room and meals, she was expected to perform "light duties." These included cleaning the fourteen rooms of the academy and helping to care for the thirty other students, some her own age or younger.

She slept in a room under the stairs leading to the attic. Each morning in winter she awoke at six, broke the ice in the top of her washbasin, washed her face, got dressed, hurried to the other rooms, started the fires, awakened the children, helped the younger ones get dressed, then hurried to the kitchen and dining room to prepare breakfast. After the children had eaten and the tables were cleared, she had ten minutes to eat, stack the dishes, run to her room, change into her school uniform, and go to class. The procedure was the same for lunch. At dinner there was a short break afterward.

When Billie missed her schedule, failed in her duties, or attempted to ask for help from the other girls, she was physically abused by the headmistress. "Once when I asked a girl for a dustpan, she grabbed me by the hair, threw me down a flight of stairs and beat me with the handle of a broomstick until I was dazed. 'I'll teach you how to work if I have to kill you,' she shrieked."

Billie could not complain. Who would listen? Her mother? Her older brother? They were busy with their own misery, and usually took sides against her. Once, when the humiliation and the beatings became too much to endure, Billie ran away. She was found sitting in a park by a policeman, who brought her back to school. The headmistress showed concern and sympathy in front of the law. As soon as the policeman left, she opened the door to the cellar, kicked Billie down the steps, then shut off the light and left her there for the night. Billie never cried. She kept her tears in check, stored up in a place no one could touch. Years later, as a famous movie star, when called upon to cry on cue for the camera, Joan Crawford would only have to close her eyes and think of those early days and the tears would come, "flowing long after the director yelled cut."

In time Billie learned how to please those in authority at Rockingham Academy. She completed her chores with perfection, then volunteered for more. Her diligence occasionally drew praise from the headmistress. "I lived for those words," she said. "I also learned firsthand about hard work and discipline, and about the satisfaction that comes from a job well done."

In her youth, Bette Davis was also somewhat of a perfectionist—in dress and decorum. "An untied lace on a shoe, or a wrinkle in a dress, drove me into a fury," she said. Her standards could also be unsettling. On one occasion, while Bette was at the circus, the elephants were supposed to appear and dance on a red rug. "The rug was crooked," said Bette, "and that ruined the rest of the show for me."

At school one Christmas she was chosen to play Santa Claus. She stood too close to the candles on the tree and her beard caught fire. Screaming, she was quickly wrapped in a blanket. When they unwrapped the scorched child, her eyes remained closed. "Her eyes!" the teachers and children cried in unison, as Bette feigned blindness. "A shudder of delight ran through me," she said. "I was in complete command of the moment. I had never known such power."

Joan Crawford, during her final year at Rockingham Academy, also discovered power. It was not in her dramatic talents but in her ripening sex appeal. Her body had filled out, and her face, with its perfectly formed features, began to elicit looks of lust and envy from the coed students. Invited to attend a local dance by one of the older boys, Billie, with her "natural rhythm and lusty beauty," became the proverbial belle of the ball. "She possessed a presence and personality that took one's breath away," said Jim Miller, a potential suitor. "Young men would practically line up on the dance floor to make dates with her." "As long as the music was playing, I kept dancing," said Joan. "I wanted that night to go on forever."