I was a little surprised there wasn’t a thread for this show here. I loved this show and thought it was both campy fun and genuinely heart-breaking. I was only really familiar with the “Mommy Dearest” version of Joan Crawford’s life, but Jessica Lange completely reinvents her and makes her a surprisingly sympathetic character without glossing over her many flaws. Sarandon was great as well, creating a character that was recognizable as Bette Davis without descending into the campy imitation that any drag queen can do.
But for someone like me who isn’t all that knowledgeable about the backstage shenanigans in Hollywood, how much of what was depicted was true to life? I know that the major events (the “Baby Jane” movie itself, Joan upstaging Bette at the Oscars, the “Hush Hush” debacle) are real. And there’s plenty of youtube clips of Davis on “the Andy Williams show” (and side-by-side shots of Sarandon’s remarkable imitation.) Still, I imagine there were SOME liberties taken.
Anybody who watched the show and know the REAL real story might want to weigh in? Just curious.
E Online has actually been doing a weekly fact checking. In general, it seems to be pretty accurate. There are some changes (Mamacita came and went a bit more often [sometimes because of family matters- she had 9 children], Victor Buono was apparently a good friend of Crawford as well as Davis, etc.) and some speculation (whether Crawford made a stag film is a matter of debate, though whether it was guilt or blackmail her brother leaching off of her did happen) but the general narrative is apparently accurate.
One thing I would like to know: in this and in Mommie Dearest Joan was left in dire straits financially when Al Steele died and it was revealed he was heavily in debt to Pepsi and other creditors. In Feud she confides to Hedda Hopper (would anybody actually confided to Hedda?) that she owed $2 million, which per the inflation calculator would be around $16 million today; even assuming she was exaggerating, even half that amount would be an awesome sum to pay off considering that even adjusted for inflation actresses didn’t make anywhere near then what they make now.
I know she got a bundle for Baby Jane since she had a percentage of the profits, but Hollywood profits are notorious, plus even if her percentage was off the gross and was given honestly it would have been far far less than $2 million and subject to taxes and other bills and living expenses.
However, by the 1970s she was living comfortably in NYC. Not lavishly- I know from a bit of googling she originally had a very large apartment that she scaled down to one about half as large at some point, and it wasn’t the California mansion, but it was still very comfortable. When she died she bequeathed several hundred thousand dollars in various bequests to her twin daughters (she famously disinherited the other two kids) and to charities and friends, and the estate was apparently solvent enough to honor the bequests.
Does anybody know how she made this turn around from “deep in debt to solvent and fairly affluent” in a relatively short period of time?
I’ll tell you this; they did one hell of a job making Susan Sarandon look like Bette Davis. They didn’t do as good a job making Jessica Lange look like Joan Crawford but that’s a very tall order. Jessica Lange looks like no one else, except Jessica Lange.
Good Lord, what an acting lineup. Jessica Lange has two Oscars, Susan Sarandon one; Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kathy Bates each have a trophy. Half a dozen or more of the others SHOULD have Oscars - Alfred Molina, Judy Davis, Stanley Tucci… it’s a Dream Team.
“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” was really profitable. Even with Hollywood accounting she got a nice cut.
Crawford was paid well for “Strait Jacket.”
Crawford remained on Pepsi’s board of directors until 1973. I don’t think she would have done that for free, nor do I think Pepsi would have been eager to have Joan Crawford, screen legend, go bankrupt while sitting on their board.
She could have sold a lot of stuff.
The show is surprisingly historically accurate, all in all. Truth be told, the story is so wonderfully hideous you don’t really need to make much up.
I’ve been watching, too, and I love the series. In addition to the two main actresses, I’m really impressed by Stanley Tucci’s Jack Warner. If this portrayal is true to life, then Jack Warner was a real piece of work. I looked up some of director Robert Aldrich’s movies after Warner belittled his abilities: The Dirty Dozen, Ulzana’s Raid, Flight of the Phoenix, all excellent movies.
And Alfred Molina’s Robert Aldrich is awesome, as well.
I missed any notice of Victor Buono’s Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor for his role in Baby Jane. He ended up losing, Ed Begley won for his role in Sweet Bird of Youth. I suppose they thought mentioning that would detract from Bette Davis’s loss in the Best Actress category.
I’m loving this series. I thought it was going to be a one-off miniseries, but apparently it will be returning with a second season focusing on Prince Charles and Lady Di.
She did need dental work to take care of bad teeth when she was young. I don’t know if she had molars intentionally removed to affect her face though. Here’s an article discussing it.
“As co-head of production at Warner Bros. Studios, he worked with his brother, Sam Warner, to procure the technology for the film industry’s first talking picture. After Sam’s death, Jack clashed with his surviving older brothers, Harry and Albert Warner. He assumed exclusive control of the film production company in the 1950s, when he secretly purchased his brothers’ shares in the business after convincing them to participate in a joint sale of stocks.”
He also had a nasty split with his son Jack, Jr.
If you can screw over your family, treating actors and directors like crap is all in a day’s work.
As a teenager, I actually had my own two back molars removed. My dentist said my teeth had grown too fast, or something or other (I wasn’t paying too much attention). It was done mainly to help straighten out my crooked teeth (accompanied by years of braces), so procedures like this were being done as late as the early 1980s. So, I was actually a little surprised at the scene when a DDS in 1969 is SHOCKED to learn Joan had done something like that. (On the plus side, I HAVE been told I have a great smile and great cheekbones.)
What an acting job by Sarandon/Lange - they both deserve Emmy’s. That final scene with Joan imagining a party, then realizing there’s no one there…incredible.
A little thing, but one that struck me as especially sad…
When Bette calls Joan and doesn’t speak. Most people would just hang up if nobody spoke. But Joan stays on the line an awfully long time, even stating “This is Joan Crawford, who is this?” as if some caller who got the wrong number might actually stay on the line when they realized they were talking to a movie star. That really speaks to how desperately lonely she must have been.
I think if I’d had to know one of them it definitely would’ve been Joan Crawford. Both were high maintenance, but Crawford seems to have had moments of warmth and generosity and just general niceness that Davis did not. One thing that is consistent in everything I’ve ever read about her is how nice she was to the crew members, which says a lot about her imo, because these were people who were not likely to talk to the papers and were relatively limited in what they could do for her.
I didn’t set understand why she did Trog in the miniseries. It wasn’t the money (she probably made as much money from one of her TV show appearances) and it certainly wasn’t the challenge or the prestige. Was it just the “romance” of film making?
Yes, it’s a fact that Joan reportedly did have that dental work done to highlight her cheekbones. It was reported in the mini-series. What we don’t know is if she actually had that dental work done to highlight her cheekbones.
She wanted to work. She had said in an earlier episode “If I’m not working, I may as well be dead,” and at that point, the offers she was getting were probably very slim pickings. She was likely locked into the thinking that being in a feature film, no matter how low budget, was a step up from television work (even a television project directed by a young Steven Spielberg.) Also, the conversation with her agent indicates she didn’t really know what she was getting into, she just jumped at the chance to be in a film. So, yeah…it was the romance of being in a film.
Joan snapping at her fans like she did in the finale didn’t really ring true to me. From what I’ve read she was always gracious with her fans, even up to the end.
It’s obvious she didn’t fully grasp what she was giving into, and that was aggravated by the way she kept building it up in her head. She actually got the point where she was thinking avant-garde independent film that the Academy will take notice of. Instead she got a film never even appeared on MST3K.
Me neither, that’s a whole new level of despair for that call. And regarding the “cocktail party”…
…did anyone else think that when we heard Mamacita calling out “Miss Crawford” it was going to cut to a scene of Joan dead in bed? It certainly felt like a dying hallucination scene (granted Bette & Jack were still alive). It was even worse that we saw Joan still hallucinating from Mamacita’s perspective. If you’ve ever had a relative with dementia that really trigger’s something.
I think that was embellishment to make a quick bond twixt him and Davis for narrative purposes. In the factchecker link it said he was actually at least as good a friend with Crawford. I thought it was a funny touch that the rent boy thought he was Charles Laughton, who was about 40 years older than Buono.
I remember staying up late to see Buono on his Carson appearance because he was always funny. I have wondered if Ignatius J Reilly from CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES might’ve been inspired at all by his character in BABY JANE.