Possessed (42 page)

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
required more than merely a competent costar, however, and Joan’s recommendation of Bette Davis was inspired. The movie, she told Aldrich, would stand or fall on the talents of the actress playing the title character—a role that permitted (indeed, required) the excesses Davis typically brought to her roles. Like Joan, Bette’s great moments in the picture were often silent—the wide-eyed glance, the perfectly timed pause, and the slight change of expression that revealed depths of unspoken feelings and a life crushed by pain and guilt. There remains something ineffably touching about Davis’s performance, especially in her scenes with Victor Buono as a potential musical collaborator who, she wrongly presumes, also offers friendship.

As it was, the two legends of the screen, as they were stereotypically termed even during their lifetimes, raised a Grand Guignol thriller to another level—a story of tragic betrayal and of penitential lives. “Oh, Blanche,” says Jane gently at the end when she learns the truth, “all this time we could have been friends.” The final scene, when remorse is overwhelmed by madness and the possibility of life is all but extinguished, is more poignant than frightening. Decades later,
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
seems more suitable for a compassionate audience than one ready to laugh.

NEVER, ACCORDING TO ANY
reliable account, did either Joan or Bette claim there was trouble between them, and writers who protested otherwise have no firsthand sources. On the contrary, as Joan wrote to a friend on August 25, “Bette Davis is a joy to work with—very professional and completely dedicated to her work. She and I get to the studio every morning, a half-hour before our calls, just longing to get in front of that camera. She is really a dear human being, with a divine sense of humor.”

Years later, little had changed in her memory of that movie: “We didn’t feud the way the publicity people wanted us to. We weren’t friends—we have different temperaments and worked together for only a few weeks—but she is a fascinating actress. We got along, and when the picture was finished, I went back to New York and Bette went back to Connecticut. Our paths didn’tcross again. I really can’t say anything against Bette. Everyone involved with
Baby Jane
was so professional and so dedicated that what could have turned out to have been a tired, forgettable little low-budget picture turned out to be a good one.”

Bette Davis was adamant about the situation. “Will it be disappointing if I say that we got along well?” she asked columnist Hedda Hopper, who was trying to elicit details about bad feelings and tart exchanges at the end of filming. “Of course there’s not a prayer that [the press] will admit everything is friendly between us—the reverse makes for a better story.” More than twenty years later, Bette told Barbara Walters, “In three weeks of filming together, nothing bad happened between us. Three months might have been different, but the three weeks went just fine.” Joan later admitted that she was “tense and nervous and desperately unhappy at the time, [but] that was part of the character I played, so probably no one on the set or in the audience noticed.”

When Bette was nominated for a best actress Oscar and Joan was ignored, she bore no resentment. “Months before the awards, I predicted that Bette would be nominated and would win. She was nominated, but she didn’t win, and that I’m truly sorry for.” As required, Joan spoke enthusiastically about the movie on national television—on October 1, during the premiere broadcast of the
Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

But at the end of filming, she had been completely exhausted—not primarily from the physical demands of acting and certainly not from any hostility with Bette Davis. Instead, she found terribly depressing the movie’s accumulation of horrors, the repressions, the hatred, torture and bitterness; the redeeming poignancy of the picture, after all, was subsequently created in the editing room. “Bob Aldrich loves evil things, horrendous things, vile things,” Joan said in 1973. “It can take an awful lot out of you if you have to face those things every day.”

1
The original title of the film was The Way We Are until Columbia decided to cash in on the popularity of Nat King Cole’s recording of the song “Autumn Leaves.” Movie rights to it were hastily purchased, and Cole’s recording was added to the credits of the film, which was then rechristened. This was a brave and socially responsible decision on the studio’s part, for earlier that same year, Nat King Cole had barely escaped death at the hands of racist mobs, just after singing “Autumn Leaves” in segregated Birmingham, Alabama.

2
Crawford’s films of the 1950s seem to have been the collective source for Faye Dunaway’s caricature of Joan in the 1981 film of Mommie Dearest.

3
It is often claimed that Monsarrat’s novel and Joan’s film took their cues from the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan Macy, particularly as dramatized in William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. But The Miracle Worker was a 1957 television drama before Gibson revised it for Broadway in 1959 and for Hollywood in 1961. Monsarrat’s novel preceded both of these and is primarily concerned with exposing the fund-raising racket.

4
In January 1959, Joan appeared in another television drama (“And One Was Loyal”); and in December, she donned Western garb for the “Rebel Range” episode of Zane Grey Theatre—a program for which she filmed another segment, called “One Must Die,” in January 1961. Also in 1961, she appeared in something called “The Foxes."

5
Farrell also wrote Whatever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? which was the basis for the movie Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte; What’s the Matter with Helen?; and How Awful About Allan. No one ever mistook a Farrell title for the work of another novelist.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Miss Crawford Is a Star!”
| 1962–1970 |

J
UST AS JOAN
was completing her scenes in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
at the Raleigh Studios on Melrose Avenue, Christina walked onto a soundstage at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios in Culver City. Scheduled for a brief appearance in the
Dr. Kildare
television series, she was approached by a technician who had been at Metro for more than thirty years and who remembered Joan’s ascent to stardom in silent pictures.

“I want to make it on my own,” Christina told journalist James Bacon later that day. “I seldom see my mother, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love her or respect her—I do, tremendously.” Asked if the reports of family feuds were accurate, Christina emphatically denied them: “We have had crises, as all daughters do with their mothers—but mine have been complicated because I have decided to make it in my mother’s own profession. But there is no feud. I have great love and admiration for my mother, both as a mother and as a great talent. I hope I can achieve even a fraction of what she has in this business.”

Christina further documented their good relationship when she wrote about her first marriage, to director Harvey Medlinsky, in May 1966. “My mother wasgenuinely delighted,” she wrote in
Mommie Dearest.
“Mother and I were in daily contact. Mother was superb. She managed every last detail of the event"—the wedding, Christina’s dress, the announcements and the reception at the 21 Club in New York. Joan’s lavish wedding presents included a pearl necklace she had received from Alfred; later, Joan also gave Christina a gold watch.

After the honeymoon, when the groom had to travel on business, Christina recalled:

I was not the least bit lonely {because} I visited Mother nearly every other day, basking in our mutual homecoming and enjoying every minute of it. I had a new apartment to settle, a new life to manage, letters to write, and my mother’s love. I spent many evenings at Mother’s apartment. For the first time, I felt really comfortable with her. She seemed to feel the same and went out of her way to plan fun things for us to do together. I was almost automatically included in her social events, met the majority of her New York friends and business associates and spent quiet evenings with her just watching television and talking. There were still some days when she was in a bad mood and she drank quite a bit, but her fits of anger were never directed at me.

Christina wrote at length about the “real understanding and genuine friendship” she enjoyed with Joan. “She trusted me and looked to me for my opinion.” Such was their relationship in the 1960s.

AS JOAN MADE HER
way through 1963, her travel schedule might have wearied a woman half her age, but there she was—greeting this mayor or that foreign dignitary on behalf of Pepsi-Cola; signing copies of
A Portrait of Joan
at a bookstore; opening a new Pepsi bottling plant; appearing on a television drama or talk show; promoting a movie; filling a slot on a quiz or game show. In the early 1960s, she was being introduced as “the legendary Joan Crawford,” which annoyed her. Still in her fifties and very much a working woman,she thought the description was more appropriate for someone dead—or at least of very advanced years and long retired. She wore the latest styles, pushed her hair into fashionable hats, put on oversized sunglasses and otherwise did what she could to be of her time. But she was not of her time, and soon she realized that could be a blessing, too, despite her irritation over the rudeness of the culture.

During that decade, there was a long necrology of those with whom Joan had worked, and their deaths always prompted letters to their relatives and kind words to the press; indeed, she was very much touched by the deaths of Margaret Sullavan, Jeff Chandler, Gail Russell, Clara Blandick, Ramon Novarro, Steve Cochran and Albert Dekker. Some of them were younger than she, and to friends like Myrna Loy and Billy Haines she expressed astonishment at the passing of people she thought were, like herself, in their prime.

Her brother was among them. In May, Harold Hayes Le Sueur died in Los Angeles of a ruptured appendix. He was fifty-nine and had for a long time been living in virtual obscurity. Joan had continued to send money over the decades. He never had a career, had not remarried since his second divorce in 1934 and must have suffered enormously from his many years of alcohol and drug addiction—although he had apparently made impressive steps toward recovery in his last years.

At the time of his death, Hal was supplementing Joan’s checks by working as a clerk at one shabby downtown motel and answering the telephone at night at another, where he lived alone. His last known public statement about Joan was made in 1954: “For personal reasons, I must refrain from saying why I never see my sister.” She did not attend his funeral, which coincided with her visit to the White House as chair of the Stars for Mental Health campaign; she was part of a small delegation meeting with President Kennedy. That November, she was at a Pepsi function in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated in that city.

BABY JANE
WAS STILL
drawing crowds during the summer of 1963, and more thoughtful reviews were being published. “A second viewing of Joan Crawford’s performance reveals what hitherto I have not believed,” wrote Arthur B. Clark in the prestigious journal
Films in Review,
“namely, that she
is
an actress and not merely a beautifully bone-structured personality.”

The trade paper
Motion Picture Herald
agreed: “Miss Crawford plays beautifully and nobly.” No less a high-toned magazine than the
Saturday Review
was rhapsodic: “A superb showcase for the time-ripened talents of two of Hollywood’s most accomplished actresses, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Scenes that in lesser hands would verge on the ludicrous simply crackle with tension.”

Variety
wrote perhaps most lavishly of all. “Miss Crawford gives a quiet, remarkably fine interpretation of the crippled Blanche. Confined to a wheelchair and bed throughout the entire picture, she has to act from the inside and has her best scenes (because she wisely underplays with Davis) with a maid and those she plays alone. In one superb bit, Miss Crawford, reacting to herself on television, makes her face fairly glow with the remembrance of fame past. Her performance is a genuine heartbreaker.”

The good notices and continuing media appearances on behalf of
Baby Jane
brought to Joan’s door the director William Castle, the self-described “B-movie mogul,” who had a script called
Strait-Jacket
—the story, he said, of a woman in her fifties. Joan at once interrupted: “If I do it, she’ll be in her forties.” Okay, Castle continued, this is a story about a woman in her forties named Lucy Harbin, who is committed to a lunatic asylum after taking up an ax and giving however many whacks were necessary to kill her faithless husband and his girlfriend, whom she found together in bed.

Released after twenty years, Lucy tries to establish ties with her now adult daughter, Carol, who had apparently witnessed the double murder as a child. Soon Lucy’s erratic behavior and a few more unexplained decapitations at the family farm indicate that she may have been prematurely sprung from confinement. But no, it turns out that her daughter is the real ax-wielder and has recently taken to dressing up like Mother. This is all easily explained: Robert Bloch wrote the screenplay, just after the success of his earlier novel,
Psycho—
and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of it.

As Joan read the script, she saw holes larger than those in Swiss cheese, and so she invited Castle and two of his financiers to lunch. “She was one of the most dynamic women I ever met,” Castle recalled. “She knew what she wanted and always got it—including script, cast and cameraman approval.” As Joan doled out generous portions of homemade quiche and tall glasses of cold Pepsi, she said sweetly,
“Strait-Jacket
will have to be completely rewritten as a vehicle for me, or I will not accept the role.” It was, and she did—for a guarantee of fifty thousand dollars and no more than two and a half weeks of work at Columbia Studios in Los Angeles that August. But
Strait-Jacket
was no better after the rewrites: as one wit suggested, it might have been subtitled
What Ever Happened to Baby Monster?