Joan Crawford: a bewitched creature of extremes

Joan Crawford in her prime was a bewitched creature of extremes. If Crawford’s relentless pursuit of perfection kept her youthful, then it also trapped her inside an impossible time capsule from which there was no escape. All five of Crawford’s marriages were more short-lived than some of her ephemeral film plots. Although Crawford remained on amicable terms with all her former husbands she was also quick to recognize that there was only one great love in her life – her career.

Joan Crawford’s relationship with men in general had always been very complex. Arguably, she craved their affections and attention, yet quickly grew tired of them once the initial flourish of excitement had ended; somehow unable to reconcile her private life within her own career. In truth, Crawford’s career had always been paramount and would remain so until her death. In 1935, Crawford made I Live My Life – a minor melodrama in which she emerged as a truly independent woman of the world. In reality, she was preparing for another marriage – to Franchot Tone on October 11, 1935 – despite the fact that she had recently told a fan magazine that “…if anyone catches me marrying again, I hope they give me a good sock in the mouth!”

Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone could not have been more different from her first to Fairbanks Jr. The newlyweds spent quiet secluded evenings at home. Tone introduced Crawford to high culture; art and literature and even encouraged her to expand her range and do radio-plays of imminent stage classics by Ibsen and Shaw. Ironically, with this newly acquired sophistication, a sudden downturn in Crawford’s box office popularity occurred. MGM cast her with Gable once again in Love on the Run (1935) a romantic comedy in which their usual sexual chemistry was strangely absent.

For The Bride Wore Red (1937) – costarring Tone - Crawford adopted an entirely new look that failed to gel with her fans. Tone’s frequent dalliances with starlets (at one point he was accepting calls on Crawford’s dressing room wire while she was being made up in between takes), eventually broke both Crawford’s spirit and the marriage. Each began to rapidly deteriorate.

When Ladies Meet (1941) casts Crawford as a thoughtless authoress, Mary Howard, who begins an affair with her married publisher, believing his lies that the wife (Greer Garson) is a terrible person without ever having met her. Thankfully, Crawford’s own boyfriend (Robert Taylor) decides to intervene, introducing the wife to the mistress before either knows who the other actually is. A friendship ensues and Mary realizes what a little fool she’s been. Playing the ‘other woman’ was not good for one’s career, however, and Crawford could see the writing on the wall. Although she deeply resented Mayer for giving up on her career, Crawford asked to be released from her MGM contract. Unfortunately for Jack Warner, he underestimated Crawford’s own resilience in refusing projects until she was absolutely satisfied with the material being offered. Although the ink of Joan’s contract had dried in 1942, she would not appear in a Warner Bros. movie until nearly three years later.

Crawford’s personal satisfaction eventually settled on Mildred Pierce (1945) a film noir based on James M. Cain’s scathing novel of family incest and marital deceptions. Originally, the project had been offered to Davis, and then Rosalind Russell. Both turned it down. Told of Crawford’s interest in the property, director Michael Curtiz was less than enthusiastic until she agreed to do a screen test. The test won over Curtiz almost immediately and the resulting film became both a critical and financial success, winning Crawford her one and only Best Actress Academy Award.

For the next few years, Crawford continued to dominate with a string of hits – an achievement not lost on Bette Davis, whose own box office and backstage clout continued to slip in proportion to Crawford’s success. Crawford’s next two movies Humoresque (1946) with John Garfield and Possessed (1947), a psychological melodrama costarring Van Heflin, elevated both her stature and her popularity. She was suddenly the grand dame at Warner’s; a note of distinction once exclusively occupied by Davis. Crawford’s next two films were almost as good.

In Flamingo Road (1949) she plays a sideshow performer who refuses to be chased out of town by co-star Sidney Greenstreet’s corrupt city official, and in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), Crawford ran the gamut of emotion and situations to deliver a high caliber performance as a sales girl masquerading as a socialite. In between Crawford even found time to spoof her own image with a cameo in It’s A Great Feeling (1949) – slapping costars Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan across the cheek. When asked why she had struck them, Crawford shrugs her shoulders and coyly replies, “I do that in all my pictures!”

During Flamingo Road, Crawford had begun a behind-the-scenes affair with married director Vincent Sherman. It was fleeting at best and ended bitterly when Sherman refused to divorce his wife. Crawford could perhaps forgive the snub. But she would never let Sherman forget it. By the time the two collaborated on The Damned Don’t Cry, director and star were at odds. At one point during the shoot, Crawford was admonishing her son Christopher for a minor indiscretion. When Sherman quietly suggested that perhaps there was another time and place for such hysterics, Crawford redirected her anger at Sherman, attempting to trip him as he exited her trailer. In retaliation Sherman turned around and severely struck his star in the face.

Esther Williams has told some interesting tales about what occurred before, during and after the cameras stopped rolling. Crawford had come to Williams’ dressing room to beg for the services of director Charles Walters who was finishing up Easy To Love (1953) for Williams; then shooting on another part of the MGM back lot. Crawford made it known that she intended to pursue Walters romantically. “But Joan, he’s gay,” Williams reported told Crawford. “Oh, hell what does it matter?” Crawford is rumored to have replied with a sly wink. Another story told by Williams has Joan standing alone on a soundstage after cast and crew had gone home for the day, screaming, “Why have you left me? What have I done?” presumably to the imaginary audience that had stopped going to see her pictures.

Robert Aldrich had his hands full on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). “Joan never hated Bette as far as I could tell,” long-time friend Betty Barker once said, “The animosity was all the other way.” Indeed, Bette Davis repeatedly challenged Crawford and Aldrich throughout the shoot, trying the director’s patience. “It was odd to see how intimidated Crawford would get,” costar Victor Buono once commented, “They would rehearse a scene together and Bette would look at Joan from under her eyelid and say something like ‘Is that the way you’re going to play it?’ and Joan would say ‘yes’ and Bette would just shrug her shoulders. I could see Joan losing her nerve. It was belittlement – subtle. But it worked.”

Davis did, in fact, have the more plum role in the movie and she relished its theatricality. After Davis ‘accidentally’ kicked Crawford in the head during their confrontation scene Crawford was taken away to get stitches, sobbing and heard saying “I just don’t know why she hates me so much.” In another scene, where Davis binds Crawford to a hook to keep her from leaving her bedroom, Crawford declared that the rope around her wrists was too tight, to which Davis simply replied “It has to look real” before applying a tape patch to Crawford’s mouth to stifle any further objections while Davis and Aldrich discussed the scene.

While it is true that Crawford adored her fans, she was also not reserved in her condemnation of all that Hollywood had become by the early 1960s, telling guests during a televised interview with Dick Cavett in 1968 that the industry had changed for the worst. “Today they are little cliques full of little people and you may have it!”

Crawford once told a reporter, “When I hear people say, ‘There’s Joan Crawford’ I turn around and say, ‘Hi! How are you?’” Indeed, the public always came first in Crawford’s estimation. Perhaps, it is one of Hollywood’s small ironies that a similar code of career ethics belonged to Crawford’s arch rival - Bette Davis. In retrospect, both Crawford and Davis seem to have run parallel courses, converging as a train wreck on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Both Crawford and Davis were prone to extremes and personal obsessions. Each was driven to excel at their respective alma maters and both ended up with unrepentant children who wrote unflattering alternate truths to their lives from the skewed perspective of a parent’s shadow.

The undoubted reality is that Joan Crawford ought never to have considered becoming a mother. She was, after all, a driven creature of varying ambitions; all energies converged on attaining and maintaining her peerless screen image. Yet, despite Mommie Dearest, Joan Crawford’s star is much more pervasive and everlasting today. “There’s that ‘you’re only as old as you feel business’”, Joan once suggested, “…which is fine to a point. But you can’t be Shirley Temple on the good ship lollipop forever! Sooner or later, damn it, you’re old!” Yet, Crawford never quite took her own advice.

In the 1960s and 70s she readily appeared to be tempting the specter of youth with flashes of flirtation as she waxed affectionately about the good ol’ days in Hollywood while on the talk show circuit, all the while unconscious of the fact that her own youth had passed. Her stardom was by then practically a relic from that bygone age. -Nic Zegarac for "The Hollywood Art: Joan Crawford" (2013)

"Fast & Furious" (1939) - Full Movie

Ann Sothern and director Busby Berkeley were beginning their contracts at MGM while Franchot Tone was ending his in the last of three films depicting the adventures of husband-and-wife book dealers who kept getting involved in murder. Though the tale of homicide at a beauty pageant was not in the same league as such classic 1939 releases as The Wizard of Oz or The Women, it still had the kind of breezy good humor that made the B-movies of Hollywood's golden age so much fun.

Ann Sothern and Franchot Tone in "Fast & Furious" (1939)

Joel and Garda Sloane first sleuthed in Marco Page's 1938 story Fast Company. At the time, the studio was looking for insurance in case the popular Thin Man series folded. Star William Powell had been off-screen for a year, first mourning the death of fiancÈe Jean Harlow, then recovering from cancer surgery. His on-screen partner, Myrna Loy, was in the midst of one of her many battles with the studio, so executives started looking for a new team that would click with fans. Originally, they planned to make a Thin Man film with Melvyn Douglas and Virginia Bruce, but fearing a bad audience reaction, they decided to try another series instead.

Director: Busby Berkeley
Screenplay: Harry Kurnitz
Cinematography: Ray June
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart
Music: D. Amfitheatrof, C. Bakaleinikoff
Principal Cast: Franchot Tone (Joel Sloane), Ann Sothern (Garda Sloane), Ruth Hussey (Lily Cole), Lee Bowman (Mike Stevens), Allyn Joslyn (Ted Bentley) Source: tcm.com

The Bride Wore Red (Joan Crawford & Franchot Tone) - Full Movie

"THE BRIDE WORE RED" (1937) directed by Dorothy Arzner, starring Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Robert Young and Billie Burke. SYNOPSIS: A nightclub singer gets an offer from a wealthy drunk she just can't refuse – the chance to live the high life for two weeks at a fancy resort, all expenses paid – and finds herself torn between the affections of two men. Should she settle for a simple life with the local postman or make sure she never has to worry about money again by marrying a wealthy playboy?

"I want you to marry her, and I want my love to haunt you... to make you lie awake at night, to burn your heart, to make you sick with pain! I want you to think of me and to ache for me. I want never to see you again!" -Annie (Joan Crawford) to Rudolph 'Rudi' (Robert Young)

Giulio (Franchot Tone) to Annie (Joan Crawford): "How much did he pay you for that kiss?"

Franchot Tone is undoubtedly the better choice as he has more personality than a stick – sorry Mr. Young – and is clever and funny here. Being a postman on a remote mountain it's no wonder why he sets his cap for a lovely dame like Anni, who's at least within his reach unlike the other ladies who come through town. They have much better chemistry and their scenes together are what keep this silly romance afloat. The Count makes his point, in a way, but it never quite comes off as the dig at the snottiness of the rich I think they were trying to convey. Plus we get a bit gipped by not really being able to see the vibrant red dress of the title – a fairly big plot point – since the film is in B&W. Source: www.crazy4cinema.com

TODAY WE LIVE (1933) 18 Friday (9:00 AM)
An aristocratic English girl's tangled love life creates havoc during World War I. Director: Howard Hawks Cast: Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Robert Young. BW-113 mins, CC

THEY GAVE HIM A GUN (1937) 25 Friday (8:45 AM)
With no other prospects, a World War I veteran turns to crime.
Director: W. S. Van Dyke II Cast: Spencer Tracy, Gladys George, Franchot Tone. BW-95 mins, CC

THE BRIDE WORE RED (1937) 30 July Wednesday (8:AM)
A chorus girl crashes an exclusive Swiss resort to snare a rich husband. Director: Dorothy Arzner Cast: Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Robert Young. BW-103 mins, CC Source: www.tcm.com

Bette Davis: A Studied Madness

"I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache." -Bette Davis

"Players should be immortal, if their own wishes or ours could make them so; but they are not. Their life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness. The height of their ambition is to be beside themselves." —William Hazlitt (English literary critic)

SATAN MET A LADY (1936) - 15 July
In the second screen version of The Maltese Falcon, a detective is caught between a lying seductress and a lady jewel thief. Dir: William Dieterle Cast: Bette Davis, Warren William, Alison Skipworth.
BW-74 mins

JIMMY THE GENT (1934) - 17 July
An unscrupulous detective makes a killing locating missing heirs. Dir: Michael Curtiz Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins. BW-68 mins. Source: www.tcm.com

"Many actors claim to enjoy playing villains and thugs, bitches and tramps, but few have ever equaled Bette Davis’s capacity to risk generating an audience’s thoroughgoing contempt, let alone openly invite it. Bette Davis didn’t give a goddamn. She dares us to hate her, and we often do. Which is why we love her." -Ed Sikov

If Conrad Nagel was right, it was Bogart who said: “That dame is too uptight,” adding, “What she needs is a good screw from a man who knows how to do it.” Bette, also in Nagel’s telling, thought Bogie was “uncouth.”

Bette Davis’s first contract with Warners is dated November 19, 1931, and specifies her salary at three hundred dollars per week. There’s an addendum designed to put little starlets in their place: “Where black, white, silver, or gold shoes and hose will suffice, artist is to furnish same at her expense.” Darryl Zanuck took some of the credit for moving Bette Davis to Warner Bros. Zanuck was a Warners executive at the time: "We sent [Arliss] a newcomer named Bette Davis—I didn’t think she was very beautiful—and he called back and said, ‘I’ve just heard one of the greatest actresses.’"

Bette enters her first scene in her film, 'The Rich Are Always with Us,' in constant motion—shifting her body, biting her lines, not exactly twitching but scarcely standing still. It was partly a conscious performance, but it also resulted from real intimidation. The film’s top-billed star, Ruth Chatterton, was then in the Hollywood pantheon, and Bette was terrified of her. Davis’s bitchy description of Chatterton’s entrance onto the set is well worth quoting: “Miss Chatterton swept on like Juno. I had never seen a real star-type entrance in my life. I was properly dazzled. Such glamour! She was absolutely luminous and radiated clouds of Patou and Wrigley’s Spearmint.” But Bette’s jumpy energy endures today as a unique performance style, while Chatterton’s too-too glamour diction has long grown musty.

Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck cast Bette in her first truly great role: that of the southern belle Madge in Cabin in the Cotton. Davis turns to Barthelmess on the dusty porch of the general store, her eyes tilt appreciatively down his body and back up again, and she says, “Cute! I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair. Bye!” In later years, Davis used this line as a comedy routine—a piece of supposedly nonsensical Hollywood dialogue she could trot out on talk shows and in interviews to get the interviewer and audience on her side.

Davis worked on 'Cabin in the Cotton' from May 17 through June 9. The following day she began shooting 'Three on a Match' with the director Mervyn LeRoy; she finished that one on the thirtieth. Davis’s part is by far the smallest and least meaty of the three. Making matters worse for Davis, Three on a Match is the film that inspired Mervyn LeRoy to utter a prediction he came to regret: “I made a mistake when the picture was finished. I told an interviewer that I thought Joan Blondell was going to be a big star, that Ann Dvorak had definite possibilities, but that I didn’t think Bette Davis would make it.” It was remarks like that which prompted Davis to dispatch unbelievers to an icy hell of contempt.

Bette felt deeply ambivalent about becoming Ham Nelson ’s wife. Yes, she loved him; yes, she thought they had a good chance to be happy together. But she was worried. “I was afraid for Ham, afraid of what Hollywood would do to his career, afraid of putting him in a position of being a star’s husband.” In The Lonely Life, Bette asserts that she and Ham spent their honeymoon helping Warner Bros. plug its big, modern, glossy musical 42nd Street. She arrived in Boston as a hometown heroine on March 8, 1933; a crowd of 10,000 people braved a driving rain to greet her at the station. Bette’s wedding night wasn’t nearly so blissful. As she told her friend, the writer Jerry Asher, Ham’s provincial naiveté extended to matters sexual. He had never been with a woman before; it was, she told friends, months before she had “trained” him to please her: “The lust I had feared was natural and beautiful. I was released.”

Davis was never particularly fond of Jimmy the Gent—neither she nor most critics ever appreciated her genuine if offbeat talent for comedy—but the movie has found its share of fans. The critic Otis Ferguson wrote, “If this wasn’t the fastest little whirlwind of true life on the raw fringe, then I missed the other one.” Andrew Bergman (Blazing Saddles) called it “simply a great American comedy” and “the funniest film of Cagney’s career.” Cagney recalled Davis as being unhappy during the filming of Jimmy the Gent: “Her unhappiness seeped through to the rest of us, and she was a little hard to get along with.” Cagney’s biographer, Doug Warren, went further, describing her personal reaction to her co-star as one of “contempt.”

It’s pure speculation, but one wonders whether Bette Davis would have had the January 1934 abortion (a studio doctor performed the procedure, quickly and safely, in a medical setting) had 'Of Human Bondage' not been presenting itself imminently as her first potential masterpiece. “Harmon didn’t even know she was pregnant,” insists Anne Roberts Nelson, Ham’s second wife. “It was Ruthie who talked her into it." At stake was something even more central to Bette’s life than her mother: her art. Mildred Rogers was the first truly important role Bette wanted. 'Of Human Bondage' began shooting toward the end of February 1934, at RKO’s studios in Hollywood on the corner of Melrose and Gower.

Bette’s Cockney accent is layered, impure—a low-class twang unsuccessfully masked by pretension. Mildred Rogers (from W. Somerset Maugham’s semiautobiographical novel) is one of the most unsympathetic characters ever transferred to film. A sullen, slatternly, barely literate Cockney waitress, she coldly manipulates Philip Carey, the shy, sensitive, club-footed artist-turned-medical student who obsessively loves her. Davis herself claimed never to have understood Philip’s fierce attraction to Mildred. She believed in Mildred’s vile nature; one has no doubt that Davis nailed this character so squarely because she saw something of herself there —the manipulative ambition, if nothing else. But for Davis, Philip’s “whimpering adoration in the face of Mildred’s brutal diffidence” was unfathomable. Davis is one of melodrama’s greatest dancers. Davis snarls the words with rancid sarcasm. “You want to be a doctor!” she snaps as she rips pages out of his medical textbook.

“This’ll take ya through medical school,” Mildred says as she sets the bonds on fire and leaves them burning in an ashtray. 'Of Human Bondage' is the first defining moment in Bette Davis’s career, and it’s psychologically perverse, to say the least. Bette found Howard “as cold as ice” on the set, resentful of her casting. Howard’s attitude changed the moment he saw the first daily rushes. Life magazine called it “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress,” and to this day it remains one of the best. Davis once wrote of her performance, "My understanding of Mildred's vileness - not compassion but empathy - gave me pause. I barely knew the half-world existed. And yet Mildred's machinations I miraculously understood when it came to playing her? I suppose no amount of rationalization can change the fact that we are all made up of good and evil."

The script for Dangerous (loosely based on the tragic life of the stage and silent film star Jeanne Eagels) was a dramatic hodgepodge. But it gave Bette a meaty, rangy role to play. Dan Bellows, a handsome young architect (played by Franchot Tone, on loan from MGM), falls in love with her, helps her to dry out, and finances her stage comeback. The story of a once superb, now derelict Broadway actress —what Jeanne Eagels might have become if she hadn’t overdosed on chloral hydrate in 1929— won Davis her first Academy Award. This Oscar is usually considered to be just the consolation prize for not even having been nominated for 'Of Human Bondage.' Bette admitted that she “fell in love” with Tone during the filming, and her passion was returned.

For the first time, Bette became enmeshed in an extramarital affair—with the man who was now engaged to marry Joan Crawford. One afternoon during 'Dangerous' production, the film’s producer, Harry Joe Brown, walked through the open door of Bette’s dressing room and stopped dead in his tracks. There were Bette and Franchot in what he delicately described as “a very tight position.” When they saw Brown, neither seemed perturbed. Later, Brown recalled, “they were all over each other on the set.” Tone returned Bette’s passion, but not her love. For him, she was just another in a long line of conquests.

When the filming ended, so did the affair, and soon thereafter Tone married Joan Crawford. Crawford was alerted to the liaison, but she was working long hours at MGM to finish I Live My Life, and there was little she could do. Clearly, the much-celebrated later feud between Davis and Crawford had its genesis in Franchot Tone’s dalliance with Bette.

Although they were two of the more intelligent and liberal actors in town, there was no love lost between Davis and Robinson. “All of us girls at Warners hated kissing his ugly purple lips,” Bette said in retrospect. Privately she called him “mush mouth.”

Bette and Ham Nelson moved into the Park Lane Hotel, whereupon Ham decided he’d had enough and announced that he was departing for New York to find work as a musician. Bette was surprised and upset. “It wasn’t often I needed him,” she writes with brutal honesty in her autobiography The Lonely Life. “This was the only time.” Michael Curtiz overheard the couple bickering at a screening of Front Page Woman, with Ham accusing Bette of being a little too believable in her onscreen attraction to George Brent and stomping off hissing “Horseshit!” after Bette explained that she was simply doing her job. After their divorce in 1938, Ham went to New York, where he took a job with the advertising firm of Young and Rubicam.

Bette had lost both her husband and Howard Hughes, but she still, after a fashion, had William Wyler. They had drifted apart, he’d spent time in Europe, but it was clear that his love for Bette had not waned. The fights with Bette didn’t destroy his ardor—he wanted to marry her. "I was in no way the hostess that he wanted a wife to be,” said Bette.

“I earned the Oscar I received for Jezebel,” Davis later wrote. “The thrill of winning my second Oscar was only lessened by the Academy’s failure to give the directorial award to Willy. He made my performance. He made the script. Jezebel is a fine picture. It was all Wyler.”

Like Leslie Howard before him, Flynn made overtures to Davis, but once again she spurned them. “I confused him utterly,” Davis wrote about The Lonely Life. “One day he smiled that cocky smile and looked directly at me. ‘I’d love to proposition you, Bette, but I’m afraid you’d laugh at me.’ I never miss the rare opportunity to agree with a man.

It was no secret that filming Dark Victory was nerve-wracking for Bette almost to the point of debilitation. The columnist Dorothy Manners reported that after the divorce, Bette tried to recuperate from the stress at “La Quinta, at Palm Springs, at all the other hideaways she sought.” When Davis began shooting the film, Manners noted, “she was a sick girl mentally and physically.” But Wallis, having seen the dailies, knew that the camera—in its cold, close, mechanical way—was picking up something ineffably honest about Davis’s own anguish. “Stay sick,” he said.

In The Lonely Life, Bette was delightfully catty about her costar: “Miriam [Hopkins] is a perfectly charming woman socially. Working with her is another story. On the first day of shooting, for instance, she arrived on the set wearing a complete replica of one of my Jezebel costumes. It was obvious she wanted me to blow my stack at this. I completely ignored the whole thing. Ensuing events prove she wanted even more to be in my shoes than in my dress.” Bette knew that in her attempts to sabotage her, Hopkins was actually sabotaging herself. She went much further about Hopkins later: “Actors went through torture working with her because she was a pig about it.”

Davis’s control in The Letter is only in part a matter of repression. She plays Leslie Crosbie as a bored, stifled housewife forced to expend her libido in the creation of a crocheted white coverlet. Still, her Leslie is also a sociopath, a calculating killer and remorseless liar, ceaselessly putting on acts for those around her because authentic emotions are not part of her psychological makeup. Even as Leslie fires the gun repeatedly at Hammond’s dead body in the opening moments of the film, her face is stonelike, her feelings impossible to penetrate.

Bette loved Peckett’s Inn, a rustic retreat at Sugar Hill, New Hampshire. Arthur Farnsworth Jr. (manager and host of the inn) was handsome, charming, and exceptionally well mannered, and he came from a good family. “I really think Ruthie found it hard not to like him,” Bette conjectured. The wedding took place on the eve of the new year 1941 in Rimrock, Arizona, at the ranch of Bette’s friend, the former actress Jane Bryan.

When Goldwyn asked Wyler, who was under contract to him, to direct The Little Foxes, Wyler told the mogul that the only woman in Hollywood who could do Regina Giddens justice was Bette Davis. The philosopher Stanley Cavell, appreciating the thrust of Davis’s performance, describes Regina as “watching her husband die, as if her gaze deprives him of life.” Bette later said that all of her husbands “loathed my brightness.” When she was angry, Bette would turn into a harpy, cruelly goading Farnsworth until he couldn’t take it any longer and hit her. Farney died on August 25, 1943. He had collapsed while walking down Hollywood Boulevard two days earlier and never regained consciousness.

“There was something about her manner, flirtatious and friendly, flattering and yet honest, that made you think of her as an immediate friend and a solid master of her craft,” Paul Henreid later wrote. “I found her a delight to work with, and we got along famously... She has remained a dear, close friend—and always a very decent human being.” 'Now, Voyager' began shooting on April 7, 1942, and finished on June 23, with some retakes on July 3. After finishing 'Now, Voyager' Bette traveled in June to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, to accept an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in the name of her father, who had graduated from Bates thirty-five years earlier. Naturally, Harlow Morrell Davis had been valedictorian of his class.

'Beyond the Forest' is the inflamed tale of Rosa Moline, an ambitious woman stuck in a small town in Wisconsin, her unsatisfying marriage to the bland village doctor, her lust-ridden affair with another man, and her insatiable drive to escape it all for the big city, Chicago. It’s Madame Bovary played as pulp fiction. “I know you’re not interested in my work, but I just saved a woman’s life,” Rosa’s doctor husband remarks. To which Rosa, lying on a wicker porch couch and twisting the ends of her black fright wig, responds in crisp and singsong sarcasm, “Saved it for what?”

When William Grant Sherry heard the rumors about his estranged wife and Gary Merrill, he sent Bette a telegram pleading with her to reconcile with him. “It was a beautiful, tender, sweet letter,” Marion Richards recalls. "And what does Bette do? She reads it aloud in front of the entire cast, laughing all the time, until finally everyone wasOn October 19, 1949, three months after she left Warner Brothers, and three days after Beyond the Forest opened to disastrous reviews, Bette Davis sued for divorce from her third husband William Grant Sherry. howling. The only one who didn’t go along with ridiculing it was Anne Baxter. She was offended by the whole thing."

Bette’s first appearance in "All About Eve" (1950) on screen indelibly establishes Margo’s character—without a line of dialogue. As Addison DeWitt describes her undraped entrance into show business at the age of four, she looks up with a heavylidded, cynical world-weariness that lets us know immediately that this woman has seen it all. Apparently, Gary Merrill’s name hadn’t rung a bell to Bette when Darryl Zanuck originally told her over the phone that Gary would be her Eve leading man, but when she met him she was as impressed as ever by his rugged good looks, and pleasurably stirred by his unforced masculinity and lack of pretension.

Bette and Gary Merrill were married in Juárez, Mexico, on July 28, 1950. Immediately they embarked on their honeymoon trip, a cross-country drive from Mexico to Massachusetts. Years later, Bette admitted that she had fallen in love with Bill Sampson and Gary had fallen in love with Margo Channing—“and we woke up with each other.” On June 6, 1960, she filed a divorce action in Santa Monica Superior Court, charging that Gary had treated her with “extreme cruelty” and “wrongfully inflicted upon [her] grievous mental suffering.” She asked that Gary be ordered to pay her child support and alimony. The judge granted Bette custody of B.D., Margot, and Michael, but allowed Gary visitation rights at “reasonable times and places.”

Davis’s mix of righteousness and combustibility served to make her a frightening figure for those who worked with her. It also made her more enigmatic and intriguing for audiences and fans. It probably also frightened her. Bette Davis was scarcely easy to live with, perhaps least of all by herself. Still, her nuttiness led directly to one of the greatest performances of her career, an allstops-pulled portrait of degenerated talent and family resentment spun out of control. And for better or worse, the performance was so brilliant: Jane Hudson in 'What ever happened to Baby Jane?' (1962), that it set the tone of the rest of her career. Bette asked Robert Aldrich whether he’d ever fucked Joan Crawford. “If you had,” Davis stated, “then you couldn’t be fair to both of us.” “The answer is no —not that I didn’t have the opportunity,” Aldrich responded.

Davis appreciated the finer, creepier points of Jane Hudson better than Aldrich. She insisted not only on applying her own makeup but on designing it. “What I had in mind no professional makeup man would have dared to put on me. I felt Jane never washed her face—just added another layer of makeup each day. I used a chalk-white base, lots of eye shadow—very black—a cupid’s-bow mouth, a beauty mark on my cheek and a bleached blond wig with Mary Pickford curls.”

"There is no feud," Bette told Mike Connolly of the Hollywood Reporter after the first week of filming. "We wouldn't have one. A man and a woman yes, and I can give you a list, but never two women—they'd be too clever for that." Bette Davis: "Joan and I have never been warm friends. We are not simpatico. I admire her, and yet I feel uncomfortable with her. To me, she is the personification of the Movie Star. I have always felt her greatest performance is Crawford being Crawford."

“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," said Crawford in 1973. "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." "Sisters under the celluloid..." was how Bob Downing of Variety described them. 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." "In the very last shot of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bette Davis goes off to buy an ice cream cone for her sister. Almost magically, the grotesque makeup and wrinkles disappear from her face as she does a dance of liberation." —Cinéma Fantastique Magazine

-Playboy: Do you still feel that the Oscars you received are not those you wanted and most deserved?

-Davis: Yeah, I should have gotten one for Baby Jane. Definitely. I hadn’t thought there was a doubt in the world, and that was a huge disappointment. I felt I should have had it, no matter who else was up. I’d say I won honestly for Jezebel. But Dangerous… You know, there was just no comparison between that and Of Human Bondage. Well, the entire town thought I would win for Bondage, but It Happened One Night swept everything that year, and everyone said it was a cheat. -Bette Davis: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview), 2012

Aldrich: "I was at the beach, playing cards with Bette, and twenty minutes before the scene was shot she asked for some time by herself. She walked down the beach alone, and when she came back there was this glow on her face. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. It came from within her and reflected on her face." Bette's genius also reflected on Joan Crawford's ego. Bette Davis was a far better actress than Joan Crawford, they both knew it, and by faking infirmity in such an obvious and theatrical way [to get off 'Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte'] Crawford proved it.

Sources: "Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis" (2008) by Ed Sikov, "Bette Davis: More Than a Woman" (kindle, 2013) by James Spada, and "Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud" (kindle, 2014) by Shaun Considine