Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (39 page)

At home, as in previous times of vocational stress, Bette unleashed her repressed fury on her nearest and dearest. But, lacking a husband to fly at, and with daughter B.D. already grown to five feet ten inches ("I towered over Mother; she wouldn't touch me"), Bette had to aim her punches at her real-life sister, Bobby.

Recovered from two nervous breakdowns, Bobby was apparently still a source of irritation to Bette. "She's
jealous
of me," said the star. "She's always
tried
to drag me down. But she's never won. Ha! Even her bouts in the loony bin were kept from the press and didn't hurt me. But they sure cost me a pretty penny. She was in the rubber room at Payne Whitney more than once . . . and what I went through visiting her I can't describe."

Parallel to Blanche in
Baby Jane,
Bobby was dependent on her sister, Bette, for sustenance and survival. During the making of the film, she lived in a room above the garage at Bette's estate, and for her keep she worked as her sister's cook and housekeeper. But apparently she spoiled the children and spent too much money on food. One night, at dinner, she ruined the roast beef. Knocking the serving plate out of her sister's hand, Bette was "actually about to kick her" when B.D. intervened. The brawl continued in the kitchen. "Mother let go with one hand and hit her in the face. In an instant they were pulling each other's hair, kicking at each other, and screeching like a pair of alley cats."

Banished to her room over the garage, Bobby told B.D. she forgave Bette. She was scared to be on her own, she said, and she understood Bette. "She has pressures that she has to vent sometimes, and I'm a convenient target ... but underneath it all I know she loves me."

"I do,"
said Bette. "She's a tough customer, but she knows how to behave in my house, or I'll kick her out on her ass."

"In the scene where I was
supposed to imitate Joan over the
phone, I wasn't able to do it.
Joan had to dub in her voice for
me. She was very pleased about
that."

—BETTE DAVIS

"Nobody can imitate me. You
can always see impersonations
of Katharine Hepburn and
Marilyn Monroe. But not me.
Because I've always drawn on
myself only."

—JOAN CRAWFORD

To save time and money, while one unit was filming the exteriors of the Hudson house on McCadden Drive, a second cameraman, strapped to the front of the car, was filming Bette, driving her beat-up Mercedes along Wilcox Avenue and at Sunset and La Brea. At the McCadden Drive house that evening, Bette arrived in time to witness Joan being photographed through the iron bars of her upstairs bedroom window. Set up on a huge crane outside the window, the camera was supposed to zoom in on the imprisoned Blanche clinging to her iron bars, feebly calling out for help. As Aldrich yelled for action, Joan wheeled herself to the window and lifted herself to the bars; as the lens moved in for its horrifying close-up, the director, looking through the viewfinder, saw a frightened but fabulous looking Crawford. "Joan was wearing
lipstick
and ludicrously long
eyelashes,"
said Bette. "It was
sooo
funny. In her cry for help, my terrified costar insisted on looking like she was posing for the cover of
Vogue,"

When
Life
magazine visited the
Baby Jane
set, Bette, in the name of vanity, got to compete with Joan. A team had been assigned to photograph various Hollywood stars, when Crawford and Davis were added to the list. Assisting on the shoot was New York illustrator Joe Eula.

"We needed an old-time but classy background for Bette and Joan," said Eula, "so we decided to photograph them sitting on the front of a vintage Rolls-Royce. I set it up. We rented the car in Hollywood and drove it right up to the studio gates. Those doors swung up like an airplane hangar, and we rolled that mother onto a section of the soundstage. We had the lights set, and we were ready for the two dames. It was fairly early in the day, and they arrived wearing formal gowns, furs, and diamonds, behaving like they always dressed like this for breakfast. Bette arrived first, and Miss Crawford was late. So we sat and waited, and Davis was a little miffed. But once Crawford arrived, the two pros got in there and did their stuff. They arched their backs, threw their heads back, and we were back in the golden days when these two superstars ruled the town."

There were no pleasantries or dialogue exchanged between the two, Eula recalled. "Not a word. That's why we had them sitting on the headlights, one on each side of the Rolls. We couldn't put them within arm's reach or the fur would really fly. It was over in twenty minutes. Then one went off with her Pepsi bottle full of vodka, and the other one muttered, 'She's so fucking unprofessional.' But somehow you could sense that deep down they respected one another."

When filming ran behind schedule, the stars agreed to come in on a Sunday to rehearse the physically difficult scene where Baby Jane brutalizes her sister, Blanche. In rehearsals, Crawford agreed that there would be no stand-in involved. When the time came to shoot, she changed her mind. "She amused
me,"
said Bette. "Joan was really
not
my kind of actress. In one simple scene where I was supposed to slap her, I knew how to do it without hurting her. It's an old theatrical trick. All you do is cup your hand as you touch someone; the one being hit throws her head back, and the sound is added later. But she had her double play the scene, which made it very tense and awkward for me."

The prelude to the terror—where Joan as the crippled Blanche lifts herself downstairs by the banister, then crawls to the phone to call the doctor—had been shot previously, and edited by Michael Luciano. "We used a close-up of Joan on the phone, then cut to a long shot of Bette standing in the doorway behind her, watching. The next frame was of Joan. She senses she is being watched. She turns her head slowly, sees Bette, and begins to babble incoherently. Then the violence begins."

Crossing the hallway, Bette hangs up the phone, raises her foot, and viciously kicks Joan in the head with her shoe. She keeps on kicking her, savagely, across the hallway and into the living room.

"When it came to the actual filming of that scene, Crawford became afraid again. She said, 'I'm not doing it. I don't trust Miss Davis. She's going to kick my teeth in.' And she may have been right," said Bill Aldrich.

A dummy was used for the close shots. While the hand-held camera stayed on Bette's face and upper body, her flying feet were kicking a mannequin, not Joan, across the room. "She was kicking so hard and so viciously, we were all afraid she would break her foot," said a cast member. 'And all the while, Joan Crawford is watching this from the side of the soundstage, not with fear or revulsion, but with fascination, pleasure almost, as if she enjoyed the thought of being abused by Bette."

For the long-range two-shots, Joan had to lie on the floor and keep rolling over, as if propelled by the kicking from Bette. As staged, Bette's right foot, encased in the familiar ankle-strapped shoe, was supposed to whiz past Joan without touching her. On one take, however, it was reported that she did indeed manage to make contact with the royal Crawford noggin.

Crawford screamed.

"I barely touched her," Bette said without apology.

"She raised a fair sized lump on Joan's head," said Hedda Hopper.

"Her scalp was cut and required three stitches," another writer reported.

"I don't believe that Bette ever hurt her," said Bob Sherman. "If she did, it was an accident. She was too much of a pro for that kind of behavior."

"To my credit I have never indulged in physical punches, only verbal ones," Bette claimed.

"There are those with the scars who would claim otherwise," said Bob Downing of
Variety.

Joan would of course be avenged. On Friday morning, August 24, the last scene in Blanche's bedroom was shot. Bound and gagged and strung up underneath a spotlighted portrait of herself, Joan was to be untied, then carried from the room by Bette. Because of the camera setup, Crawford knew no double could be used, and she was determined that Davis experience her full star weight, and more.

"There is a way of making it easy on the actor who is doing the carrying," said Bob Aldrich, "but Crawford wanted Bette to suffer every inch of the way."

To add to the burden, it was said that Joan had weights strapped on underneath her long gown.

"I was told it was a special weightlifter's belt, lined with lead," said author Hector Arce.

"I'm not sure just what she had on, but you could clearly see that, when Bette lifted Joan off the bed, she was straining herself," Bob Gary recalled.

"It was a long, difficult scene," said Lukas Heller. "Bette had to lift her from the bed, carry her across the room and into the hallway."

In the first try, halfway across the room, Joan, who was supposed to be unconscious, began to cough and opened her eyes, which meant that the scene had to be done over.

"There was no break in the shot," said Heller. "It was one continuous take. Bette carried her from the bed across the room and out the door. Then, as soon as she got in the hallway, out of the camera's range, she dropped Joan and let out this bloodcurdling scream."