Bette and Joan The Divine Feud (45 page)

Feeling that "understanding was the best part of economics," the director excused Bette, and the recording was canceled. "Perhaps you should be advised," Aldrich told Zanuck, "that it is Davis' belief that after this serious warning, Crawford will return to work and give full time for one or two days and then revert to being 'too tired.' Whether there is any validity in this I no longer know."

On Friday morning, upon the advice of her lawyer, Crawford agreed to submit to a medical examination by the insurance doctor. To validate her fragile respiratory condition, she requested that a portable X-ray machine be brought to her air-conditioned dressing room. She "also insisted that 'Doctor' Prinzmetal [Aldrich's lawyer] be in attendance." Her willingness to cooperate in the examination intrigued Aldrich and aroused the suspicions of Bette, who said that she wouldn't "put it past Joan to sit up all night in front of her air-cooled system, puffing away on a carton of cigarettes to —— up her lungs."

Immediately after the examination, Dr. Gourson of the insurance company gave his report to Aldrich. Joan had a temperature of 99.2, her white blood cell count was a little over 11,000. But he minimized the importance of the star's ailments "and felt that many people walk around in far worse shape than this." Therefore he could see no reason why the actress couldn't return to work for "reasonably full time."

Crawford argued with this diagnosis. She complained of "fatigue, etc. etc." She told Aldrich she would return only if she would work "no more than two hours a day." Discussing the matter with Davis and Dick Zanuck that afternoon, the director estimated that at that slow pace it would take forty-five more days to complete the film, adding an additional $525,000 to the budget. His solution was to find out once and for all if Crawford was really sick. He wanted to call in a specialist the next day to reexamine Joan. If the specialist agreed with the diagnosis of the insurance doctor, Aldrich would then schedule Crawford "for a full day's work next week, and if she failed to perform, declare her in breach of contract."

The stage was set; the specialist was called for the next morning; and Crawford agreed to a second examination. But the super-canny star knew she was being set up. She also knew how to give the slip once more to Bette and the director. She called her own doctor. She was feeling much weaker, she told him. Even as they spoke, she could feel her pulse fading. Concerned, the doctor called an ambulance, and at seven that night, with all sirens blaring, the critical patient was rushed back to Cedars Sinai Hospital. Protected and isolated, she would remain there for the next thirty days, safe from the rage and suspicions of her wily costar and director.

"I feel terrible. This is the first
time I ever held up a picture."

—JOAN CRAWFORD TO
COLUMNIST MIKE CONNOLLY

On Tuesday, August 4, production on
Hush
...
Hush, Sweet Charlotte
was suspended indefinitely, with the cast and crew retaining full pay. "We sat on our butts for weeks, drawing full pay, waiting for Joanie to get well," said Bob Gary.

"She was a very, very sick girl," said Peggy Shannon.

"She was sick, all right, sick of Bette Davis," said Bob Schiffer.

"They are using the
wrong
doctors to diagnose Miss Crawford," said Bette. "They should send for Dr. Menninger."

"Joan couldn't take any more of Bette's intimidation," Harry Mines believed. "This was the only way she could make a positive retreat."

But on this retreat Crawford intended to take the enemy with her. During this relapse it wasn't her plan merely to hold up production on
Hush
...
Hush, Sweet Charlotte;
she wanted to close the picture down. That way she would save face, and Bette Davis would lose her role
and
the balance of the hundred thousand dollars due her in salary, plus all potential profits.

"Fox had closed down my last movie
[Something's Got to Give],"
said George Cukor, "because no actress wanted to take over for Monroe. The picture was covered [by insurance], and I think Joan figured they would do the same thing for her."

"They approached Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck. Both are friends of mine and wouldn't dream of taking a job away from me," Crawford told Louella Parsons when her infirmity entered its second week.

Wearing a $110,000 sapphire necklace with her hospital gown by Dior, she also posed for an Associated Press photographer. "With her meals catered from Chasen's, Joan Crawford is the most glamorous and popular star at the Cedars celebrity hospital" wrote Edith Gwynn. "The doctors and nurses line up each day for the privilege of taking care of her."

Joan, ever valiant and a Star, poses
for photographs in her hospital bed.

"I kept up with her condition by reading Hedda Hopper, who received frequent bulletins from Joan from under her oxygen tent," said Bette Davis.

"No one was sure what was going on," said Bob Gary. 'Aldrich felt that Joan was doing a job on him. But he couldn't prove it, because she had those doctors at the hospital who claimed otherwise."

Crawford's friend Vincent Sherman spoke of visiting the star in the hospital. "She called me the second or third week and said she was dying for company. When I got to her room, she jumped out of bed and locked the door. 'I'm not sick,' she said. 'I just couldn't stand working another minute with that Bette Davis.'"

Cautioning Bette Davis to say nothing publicly about Joan's "mystery illness" lest they lose their insurance ("If she'd been faking, the insurance company would have never paid the claim," Aldrich told
Sight and Sound),
the director embarked upon his own strategy to combat Joan and save his picture. In a memo to Dick Zanuck dated August 5, he discussed the possibility of replacing her. "To re-do the work involved with another actress would cost us roughly $285,000, plus the cost of the actress, plus the carry before said actress was able to commence," said the director.

Zanuck agreed to the extra cost. A replacement should be sought immediately, without consulting Crawford.

The choice of replacement, however, had to please Bette Davis, who had costar approval in her contract.

"Obviously the ideal candidates would have been Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn, but there are deep-seated personal and historical reasons why she didn't want them," said Aldrich. "I had a strong feeling that she didn't really want Hepburn to do it. And I knew Hepburn would probably turn us down, no matter what we offered her."

The Fox studio wanted Vivien Leigh, but it was said that Bette, still sensitive over the loss of
Gone with the Wind
some twenty-seven years before, argued that Vivien could not play an authentic Southern character (Scarlett
and
Blanche Du Bois be damned).

"Dear Bob," said Bette in a handwritten letter to Aldrich on the matter of Vivien Leigh, "I will not do Charlotte with the very British Miss Leigh. For Fox to suspend me is nonsense. This is wrong casting. The part is for an American actress and there are many. You have consulted me all along the line-this answer is
no.
Why go from the frying pan to the fire? That is what you would be doing. Trust my lousy female instincts. They have been known to be right every now and then. My roses are divine. Thank you so much. Bette."
^*5

Selection number three was Olivia de Havilland, who hesitated because of a film she made the previous year,
Lady in a Cage.
In the first fifteen minutes of that movie, her costar Ann Sothern was thrown in a closet, then strangled by some hoods, while the usually genteel and
soignée
Olivia spent the rest of the film on her hands and knees, tormented in a hot suspended elevator. "Add Olivia's name to the list of movie actresses who would apparently rather be freaks than forgotten," said
Life,
commenting on her ordeal.

When the script of
Hush .
..
Hush, Sweet Charlotte
arrived by courier at Olivia's home in Switzerland, followed by a transatlantic call from Bette Davis and Bob Aldrich, Olivia said, "Bette, thanks, but no thanks."

"But, Olivia, you
must
do this picture," said Bette. "We need you
desperately."

"Darling," Olivia replied firmly, "you know how much I hate to play bitches. They make me
so
unhappy."

"Get her to change her mind," Bette said to Aldrich when they had hung up.

"How?" asked Aldrich.

"The same way you got Crawford into this mess," she stated. "Get on a plane and
make Olivia change her mind."

Two days later, after taking three planes, a train, and a taxi up a goat trail, Aldrich arrived at Olivia's summer home in the Swiss mountains. They spoke for an entire day and night, until "the shrewd director" made the actress see the character of Miriam in a different light. Instead of being played as a hard, conniving bitch, she should be portrayed as a cool but devious sophisticate. "It's always the charming ones of evil intent who are the dangerous ones," Olivia agreed. "The others you can see coming. But you can't see Miriam coming, and she's really dangerous."

The added lure of the hundred thousand dollars in salary, plus living expenses of a thousand dollars a week for ten weeks, and first-class air transportation for her, her two children, and a nursemaid, also helped, and Olivia finally said yes to Aldrich.

She and the director then called Bette Davis in Los Angeles and gave her the good news. Aldrich requested that Bette keep the news a secret until he returned to Los Angeles in two days, when he would legally inform Crawford and her lawyer by letter. But, according to the director, further "confusion and treachery" then occurred, this time initiated by Bette. She had no intention of waiting two days to tell the world that she was finally rid of Joan Crawford. She called her press agent, Rupert Allen, who immediately leaked the story to the press.

"I heard the news of my replacement over the radio, lying in my hospital bed," said Joan. "I wept for thirty-nine hours."

Regretting "the tactless, aggressive self-serving efforts" of Bette and her staff, Aldrich dismissed the premature announcement with: "C'est la goddamn vie!"

"I still believe in this business, but there should be some gentleness," Joan wept further to the press the next day. "I think it takes a lot of guts to make pictures, and I'm going to make a lot more of them. But I am going to make them with decent, gentle people."

"She made all these statements from underneath her oxygen tent," said Bette. "The widow Steele even took a crack at Olivia. She said, 'I'm glad for Olivia, she needs the work.' "

"I still get chills when I think of the treachery that Miss Davis indulged in on that movie," Crawford told this writer in 1973, "but I
refused
to ever let anger or hate enter my heart."

"Years later, Mother would only have to
hear
the name of Bette Davis mentioned to start a tirade," said Christina Crawford. "Bette Davis was the consummate match for my mother's storehouse of tricks and intimidation. She was as shrewd a professional and every bit as indomitable."

Producer-director Robert Aldrich would also be showered with scorn by Crawford in the years to come. "He is a man who loves evil, horrendous, vile things," she said.

"If the shoe fits, wear it," said Aldrich, "and I am very fond of Joan."

Queens of Horror

Throughout the sixties, to a new generation, the names of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were synonymous with horror movies. Of the two it was Crawford who caused the most damage to her reputation, by appearing in a series of cheap, exploitative films that were many watts away from the classic days of
Mildred Pierce
and
Grand Hotel.

Stabbed between the ribs, she expired early in her second film for William Castle,
I Saw What You Did.
For four days' work she received top billing and fifty thousand dollars. When asked by Harrison Carroll why she was doing the role, Crawford replied, "Because I think the film will have a terrific identity with parents and audiences."

"Of course she rationalized what she did," said George Cukor. "Joan even lied to herself. She would write to me about these pictures, actually believing that they were quality scripts. You could never tell her they were garbage. She was a star, and this was her next picture. She had to keep working, as did Bette. The two of them spawned a regrettable cycle in motion pictures."

In 1967, when the offers ran out in Hollywood, Joan Crawford went to England to make
Circus of Blood,
later retitled
Berserk.
Dressed in a scarlet ringmaster's jacket and black leotards (designed by Edith Head), she played the owner of a traveling circus whose staff are stabbed and garroted to death. Again the true villain of the story was her troubled daughter (Judy Geeson). When asked by a British interviewer why her real-life actress-daughter, Christina, wasn't asked to play the latter role, Joan snapped, "Because she is much too old for the part."

"Bette Davis says: 'My name
goes above the title. I am a star.'
Yes, she is a star, and a great
one. But is it worth playing all
those demented old ladies to
maintain that status?"

—MYRNA LOY

In England that year Bette also found employment, but she bristled loudly when it was suggested that, like Joan Crawford, she seemed to be specializing in horror films.

"Hush
...
Hush, Sweet Charlotte
was
not
a horror film," said Bette. "It was the study of a very sad woman who had a terrible thing happen in her life."
The Nanny,
her new picture, in which a British governess knocks a ten-year-old boy unconscious and then tries to drown him in a bathtub, was described by the actress as "a problem between a nanny and a young boy. That's the contretemps."

During the late 1960s Davis did make repeated attempts to escape the low-budget horror mold. When Warner Brothers bought the screen rights to
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
she campaigned vigorously for the role of the virago, Martha. "I must
have
it," she told Wanda Hale. "I love those gutty words. I told Mr. Albee that I would
kill
for the part."

When she didn't get the role, Bette said she was shaken. "Though not as shaken as when I learned that Elizabeth Taylor would play it. That's when I really went into shock. Miss Taylor is a
darling,
but, my dear, they must be obviously making
another
picture."

In 1967 Angela Lansbury was starring on Broadway in the musical
Mame
when Bob Aldrich considered her for the lead in his new movie,
The Killing of Sister George.
"We met with her in her hotel suite," said Lukas Heller. "When Bob offered her the part of the lesbian, Miss Lansbury became quite offended. 'No, I think not,' she told him. 'I have my fans and reputation to think of.' "

Bette Davis was then approached. "I have no qualms about playing a lesbian," she told Leonard Lyons. "I have been married four times so I think my track record speaks for itself."

In November 1966 Sheilah Graham reported that Davis was also up for a lead role in
Valley of the Dolls.
She would play Helen Lawson, the tough, neurotic, boozy Broadway star, who was said to be an amalgam of several women, including Ethel Merman and Joan Crawford. Jacqueline Susann, author of the trash novel, dismissed that speculation. "Ethel Merman was a lady and a philanthropist compared to Joan Crawford," said Susann. "If I had known Joan when I was writing
Valley of the Dolls,
Helen Lawson would have been a monster."

She was still a bitch (Helen Lawson) and a strong part, Bette believed, and eager to land the movie role, she became good friends, temporarily, with author Susann. A shrewd quid-pro-quodealer, Susann also used Davis as her entree into what was left of Hollywood society. The two posed for magazine photographs at Bette's rented Malibu beach house. Susann also used Davis to push her book in media circles closed to her. Barred from appearing on the Johnny Carson TV show, Susann got Bette to plug her book for her. "You know, John," said Bette on the air to Carson, "I just read the most marvelous book. It's called
Valley of the Moon."

In March 1967, when Bette lost out on
Valley of the Dolls
and
The Killing of Sister George,
she went back to England to make
The Anniversary,
"another horror exercise for faint-hearted horror fans." The role of the fiendish one-eyed mother of three sons, one of whom "likes to wear ladies' underthings," came to Bette courtesy of Hammer Films, which was co-owned by her British son-in-law's family, the Hymans. "They were Jewish, and Mother still had an aversion to Jews," said B.D. "She even tried to get me to change my last name after I married my husband, Jeremy. I refused. I told her there was nothing wrong with Jews; they were God's chosen people. And the Hymans were good enough to employ her when no one else would."

"An affair now and then is good
for a marriage. It adds spice,
stops it from getting boring. ...
I ought to know."

—BETTE DAVIS ADVISING B. D.
TO CHEAT ON HER HUSBAND

"Christopher is 25 now and is in
Vietnam. He's in Saigon, that's
all I know. He's been running
ever since he was 5; this is the
one place he can't run from. It
will make a man of him."

—JOAN CRAWFORD TO THE
NEW YORK
POST,
1967

By 1968 Bette and Joan had forsaken Hollywood and were living on the East Coast, but in separate states. Davis bought a house in Connecticut, near her married daughter; Crawford moved to a smaller apartment at 150 East Sixty-ninth Street, where, by a wry coincidence, Bette's dentist was also located. "Every time I went there with Bette, I was hoping we'd bump into Crawford in the lobby," said Vik Greenfield, "but it never happened."

Greenfield had met Bette in California a few years before. When he relocated to Connecticut, he rented her garage apartment, and eventually became employed by her for five years. "I was her secretary, and I mean secretary," he said. "That means you babysit. All stars are children. They can't be left alone for a minute. Bette was the first to admit that. They are totally impossible to cope with—when it comes to reason and logic. I was fired about once a month, but I was always
for
her. I liked Bette. It's very difficult to dislike her. She was an Aries, with her moon in Gemini, which gives you her mind as twins. Professionally she was a completely different woman to the one we privately knew. When she was at work she was always perfect. On the set she seemed to know everything by osmosis. Without looking, she knew exactly where the camera was. So did Crawford and Turner and Taylor. They were pros, and that was their job."

In May 1968 both stars officially turned sixty. "The years are just numbers," said the outwardly complacent Crawford. Bette recalled she "screamed and stayed in bed all day," on her birthday.

Old age could be less desperate with a man around the house, Davis agreed, but one who came without a marriage certificate. Since her divorce from Gary Merrill, she had been adamantly opposed to the legal aspects of marriage. "I'd only marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars and would sign over half of it to me before the marriage and guaranteed he'd be dead before the year," she stated.

But a more thorough review of her life during this time found her less rigid in her criteria for a spouse. She was lonely and considered marrying three men during the mid-to late 1960s. One was Bob Taplinger, the former head of publicity for Warner's in California; now with a corporate public-relations firm in New York. The two re-met on a plane bound for New York, and it was Bette's idea to resume their old romance. They attended the premiere of
The Sound
of Music,
danced every dance at the party afterward, then spent long weekends together in Connecticut. When Phyllis Battelle of the Hearst syndicate reported that a wedding might be in the offing, Taplinger skipped around the issue but Davis said the idea had occurred to her. "Bob asked me to marry him 27 years ago," she told Battelle. "He's so great. When I've mentioned marriage it's been more or less in kidding form. But it could be fun. Besides, think of the loot. Bob would never
dream
of getting married without the loot!"

Taplinger, a bachelor for fifty-six years, preferred to remain that way, and Bette cast her imposing eyes on other candidates. One suitor had money and social position, she said, but he was a Catholic. His mother sent a priest to her hotel room to talk to Bette about converting. She got the holy man drunk, sent him staggering on his way, and "that was the end of my attempt to become a Catholic."

Another "fiancé" visited her in England while she was filming
The Anniversary.
She was suspicious about his mercenary intentions, so, while discussing their forthcoming nuptials, she told him her lawyer insisted he sign a premarital agreement. The next day, when she returned from the film studio, she was informed that her betrothed had packed up and left that afternoon, leaving no word of farewell. "It was a terrible blow to my pride," said Bette. "But that didn't stop her from proposing to men," said Vik Greenfield, "all of whom declined, because her reputation had obviously preceded her."

Publicly, Joan Crawford was also inclined to downplay her desire for another husband. She told one reporter, "Everytime I say I hope to remarry I get letters from retired Colonels, telling me they understand I am very rich, which I'm not, and that they still have all their teeth, and why don't we get together?"

During the mid-sixties she had a discreet but intense affair with an executive at Pepsi-Cola. He promised to leave his wife and children for the star-spokeswoman. Instead, under the pressure of an ultimatum from Joan, he left Pepsi for a better position at another company, where he refused to take her calls.

Joan was subsequently linked with Nelson Rockefeller, but he wed another. She then proposed to two men; dubious partners for passion, but perfect escorts. One was George Cukor, who displayed a 1966 photograph of Joan in his California home, endorsed with her signature and her offer of marriage. The other candidate was acting guru Lee Strasberg. A recent widower, Strasberg was placed next to Joan at a dinner party in 1967 at the home of Jennifer Jones and David Selznick. The next day she sent him a letter. "At dinner last night at Jennifer's you were very sweet to me, and I meant what I said when I asked you to marry me," wrote Joan. "I think we'd make a wonderful couple." Strasberg kept the letter, married a younger woman, and thereafter, to paraphrase actress Ruth Gordon, Crawford "drew the veil," retiring reluctantly but gracefully from the war of the sexes. In one of her last interviews, when pressed by New York
Times
interviewer Patricia Bosworth for some spicy quotes to match the recent sexual confessions of the older Gloria Swanson, Crawford countered with: "She was talking about the past, wasn't she?" "No," said Bosworth. "She wasn't?" said Joan. "Well, I think it's rather shocking. I'd rather listen to a good poem."

"Warner Brothers asked me to
play Paul Newman's mother in
Cool Hand Luke.
They offered
me twenty-five thousand dollars
for one day's work.
I
said no.
I
would have been on and off the
screen in three minutes. That
would be a cheat to the
audience."

—BETTE DAVIS

"Sure, I'd play an ape if they
asked me. Maurice Evans did."

—JOAN CRAWFORD

Without a spouse or other kindred interests to pursue, all that remained to fill the lives of Bette and Joan was their careers. "Work is all there is," said Bette. "Family doesn't last—they all go off. Human relationships—ha!—they're a joke." After making another tepid film in England, she went to California to play a retired safecracker "with arthritic fingers" opposite Robert Wagner in the TV series
It
Takes a Thief.
In Los Angeles that November she was asked to attend a farewell dinner for studio boss Jack Warner. Not long before, she had castigated Warner for selling her old films to TV ("He received five million dollars for the rights to our old movies, and we will not see a
penny"),
but as the former First Daughter she felt it was her duty to salute Papa Jack at his send-off. Among the thousand guests who attended the formal sit-down dinner on stage seven at the Warner studio were Ruby Keeler, Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell, Miriam Hopkins, Claire Trevor, Governor Ronald Reagan, Rosalind Russell, and Frank Sinatra. Missing from the alumni lineup was Joan Crawford. "She didn't show because she knew that Bette would be up on the dais ready to slit her throat," said Bette's escort, Vik Greenfield.