Well, the feud was mostly a publicity ploy. They didn’t *like *each other–though they respected each other–but were both too professional to hold up filming with a fight. Though Bette Davis was the first to admit she was a raging bitch, and she admitted it cheerfully quite often.
As actresses, I take the stance that Crawford has aged better than Davis. Look at her films: she often got terrible, terrible scripts, but she *never *gave a bad performance. And some of her best (Paid, Rain, Possessed, Grand Hotel, The Women, A Woman’s Face, Mildred Pierce, Humoresque, the second Possessed, Sudden Fear, The Best of Everything) hold up against anyone. Even in camp trash like *Queen Bee, Baby Jane *and Trog, she is doing damn good work.
Now, Bette Davis could also, of course, do amazing work: Jezebel, Dark Victory, Now Voyager, The Letter, The Little Foxes, All About Eve, The Whales of August. But she could also go around the bend and give some real “Bette Davis drag queen” howlers: Of Human Bondage, Beyond the Forest, Sweet Charlotte, The Anniversary, Bunny O’Hare.
Katharine Hepburn, too, did some real bad imitations of herself. Crawford, though, is really under-rated as an actress: watch her in Humoresque, she is breath-taking.