Certainly in the miniseries they do a poor job of making Crawford appear at all nice or sympathetic. Lange is playing her as if any display of kindness she makes is a veneer, an affectation to get what she wants. Nothing is at all sincere about her and she’s played as if she is mentally unhinged and a bit stupid. Whether that is the intention or not, it practically explodes out of the screen.
Sarandon’s take on Bette Davis, conversely, is of a person who appears to be sane and for the most part fairly pedestrian in her habits. Her hostility towards Crawford is ludicrous and she’s not the best person in the world but to most people she’s a fairly normal human being. Again, is that true, I don’t know, but it’s how she’s being portrayed.
I though the Edwin Flagg character owed a lot Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. One a writer, the other a musician, both desperate for money, both using a fading film star for cash, both stringing her along to make it last, and both ending up more involved than was good for them. That scene when Baby Jane was showing Edwin her press clippings reminded me of Norma Desmond running her old movies for Joe. At least Edwin didn’t end up the way Joe did.
Joan was known to be a consummate professional publicly. Her treatment of the fans at the book signing would have been unusual but perhaps an indication of her discontent in old age. The stories of her private behavior are quite a bit different though.
Bette’s signature was aloofness as indicated by her desire to stay home instead of attending the Oscars prior to Baby Jane. She considered an artiste and avoided the public spotlight.
Both of them would shared the same dissatisfaction with the treatment of women in Hollywood, a theme in the series that carried past the two actresses. I’m sure both would have said that male actors were treated badly in the biz as well, but nowhere nearly as badly as the way women were treated. Besides being cast as sex symbols into old age such as Clark Gable was the men had opportunities to move behind the camera denied to almost all women.
Victor Buono was an interesting character. He had a number of small roles in television, perhaps playing King Tut on Batman gained him the most recognition, but he wasn’t quite the nobody portrayed in the series by the time Baby Jane was made either, he was recognized for his talent. I was surprised at how young he was. One of his last appearances was on Taxi playing Jim Ignotowski’s father shortly before his death. He was only 43 at the time but had been playing older for most of his career.
Again, what’s portrayed in the miniseries is not necessarily what happened in real life. If it’s their intent to make Davis and Crawford equally likeable/unlikeable, they’ve failed spectacularly. Davis seems like a relateable, if flawed, human being; Crawford is positively awful. Given the skill of the actress playing her I cannot help but think that’s on purpose.
Now, as to the specific question of Davis avoiding the spotlight, one can hardly find fault with that. She went to work and then went home. Lots of actors do that. Not attending the Oscars wasn’t as uncommon a deal back then, either - after all, she was actually the only nominee in 1962’s Best Actress category to show up. Katharine Hepburn was on hand for exactly none of her Oscar wins. I might be wrong, but it seems to be it used to be more common for people to not show up.
Some people I’ve known in real life who seemed aloof and-or cold/arrogant, including some amateur actors, were in fact cripplingly shy when they weren’t performing. I wonder if that’s the case with either Davis or Crawford.
Karina Longworth did a few podcasts about Joan Crawford in her Hollywood history series. Interestingly, she speculated that while Crawford and Davis really didn’t like each other, they were also savvy enough exaggerate their rancor for the publicity.
The Oscars weren’t the major event they are now. It was just the illustration they used in the series. But I think it does a highlight a difference between them. For Bette it was about art, for Joan in was about business and her public appearance to the fans was part of her job as an actress. In the end though, it was Bette who will be remembered far more, Joan is now mostly remembered for wire hangers. Joan was initially a sex symbol, as she aged her appeal faded, it wasn’t until Mildred Pierce that she received recognition for her talent but the series hinted at the respect other actresses had for her. Bette will always be known as the Grand Dame of the movies in her time, and she was a fantastic actress. Unlike Joan she was willing to play old, Joan was too tied to her her image.
At the end of the series I remarked to my wife that there won’t be a Hollywood feud quite like than one again because the stars just don’t shine as bright as they did in those times. Both women had remarkable careers.
I don’t know about Bette but the stories about Joan indicate she was nothing like shy in her personal life. They are just stories though, with a line of ex-lovers and husbands like she had there’s gonna be a lot of talk.
The economics of the business are different, anyway. Law is different. The risks are different - even accounting for inflation, the money at stake is often much, much higher. Press is different.
The long and short of it is that a person just can’t be the titanic asshat you used to be able to get away with, because there’s even more A-list talent around. MAYBE you can get away with being a jerk if you’re really, really bankable, but it’d hard to even get that far if you have a difficult reputation. In the end, if for some reason Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence couldn’t get along, what they’d do is they’d just ditch one (or both) and hire Emma Watson or Anne Hathaway or Keira Knightley or (insert any number of three dozen talented and experienced actresses.) If Nicole Kidman was being diffuclt in negotiations, well, I bet a big producer can find Amy Adams’s number. The truth is that the fans don’t much care if the gun-slinging heroine is played by Lily Whatshername or the lady who’s in the new Star Wars films or whatever. Consequently, those women are all consummate professionals who show up sober for a day’s work, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be working. They’d get Heigled. How much work is Lindsay Lohan getting nowadays?
Men get a longer rope but even there the standards are way more stringent now. There are no Marlon Brandos anymore - yeah, Christian Bale blew up that one time, but generally speaking he’s a pro all the way, that was an unusual blowup. The money is burning while you’re shooting, and if you won’t do your job, they’ll find someone else who will. Even the big names with a reputation for being odd, like Tom Cruise, are reputed for being pros when the cameras are rolling.
There are more producers, more movies, and TV shows as good as movies. Stars with reputations for talent are created at a higher rate than ever before - look at what an AMC series did for Bryan Cranston. The industry is now a true INDUSTRY.
One could make the opposite argument, though. Being the better actor, maybe that relatability you see in Davis is the veneer you mentioned. She seems to get along well with other actors, but look at her relationships with her family- she beat her grandchild and is totally oblivious to how she traumatized her daughter. But I think it’s most crystallized during her visit to the hospital to see Margot, a visit that takes place only after she’s been cast aside by BD. She doesn’t even make the pretense of connecting with Margot in any meaningful way, instead she treats Margot like a prop to talk about herself and her own problems with her own mother. I don’t know what Margot’s condition was/is in real life, but you’ll note that, even to a daughter who doesn’t seem to comprehend due to her brain injury, Davis can’t be honest- she’s only comfortable spinning a lie about her “date” with the painter. Then there’s the bit where Davis promises not to visit Margot more often, but to send her more letters, letters that, ostensibly, will not do Margot any good, but will have only the self-serving effect of making Davis feel like a good parent. That’s positively awful.
And on the Crawford flip side, you can look at her New York life as a sort of penance- she’s all microwave dinners and paper plates. She’s no longer a real life Norma Desmond. So she’s gone from plastic furniture covers to not minding the grandkids horseplay scuffing her floor and appears genuinely touched that they would think of her as their “real” grandmother. If you take the phantom dinner party to be a window into her true thoughts at the end, you see she regrets that she wasn’t more generous with Davis. She regrets she put up the “Joan Crawford” veneer because it cost her her own self. Her final comprehension of where her decisions have ultimately led her and that she should have made better choices makes her relatable, even though she is still flawed.
That’s just devil’s advocate to your position, though. I don’t think the above is intended as the final interpretation. In fact, that’s one of the things I liked about this series- it doesn’t matter who comes off as the better person, mother, or actor, because the real feud isn’t between Bette and Joan, it’s between women and Hollywood. Theirs were stories of separate fronts in the same battle.
Speaking of microwaves; did Joan Crawford really have on of what I assume was model available to the general public? It felt like an anachronism, but sounds plausible given the timeframe and Joan still being pretty affluent.
'The first domestic microwave oven was produced in 1967 by Amana (a division of Raytheon).
In 1967, Amana, a division of Raytheon, introduced its domestic Radarange microwave oven, marking the beginning of the use of microwave ovens in home kitchens. Although sales were slow during the first few years, partially due to the oven’s relatively expensive price tag, the concept of quick microwave cooking had arrived. In succeeding years, Litton and a number of other companies joined the countertop microwave oven market. By the end of 1971, the price of countertop units began to decrease and their capabilities were expanded.’
Since prices were dropping about the time Joan moved to New York, she probably could afford one pretty easily.
I heartily agree that they made Crawford seem much more relateable at the very end; you feel quite bad for her, and happy she had a good relationship with her twins that brought her some measure of joy. (It’s probably for the best she died before “Mommie Dearest” happened.) Up to that point, though, she’s dreadful; it takes her impending mortality to make her a person.
In an even more general sense, what the show;s theme seems to be is the utter pointlessness of this type of conflict. The “battle” between them - even the extent to which the studios allegedly played them off each other - was entirely of their own ego-driven creation, and brought no one any benefit at all. Every personal battle in the series - both the Joan Vs. Bette main event and all the undercards - is a lose-lose for everyone.
I felt that until the last episode, then it flipped–probably intentionally. Joan’s a bit warmer at times, but Bette’s response to the AP reporter phoning her with news of Joan’s death was just cold.
That cycle of hubris, fall from grace, penance, enlightenment happens in all the best dramas- Joan Crawford here, Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, Ogre in Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise…
I don’t think this was the shows intention. Davis was generally better liked. I don’t know about their contemporary period but in their afterlives Davis certainly got the better press. She was around long enough to get her side of the story out to the entertainment media. She was a remarkable interviewee late in life. I think the show aimed to make Crawford someone, if not likeable, at least who we could sympathize with. Nothing creates sympathy in a female character as portraying her a victim of child abuse and misogyny.
I think the show intentionally portrayed Crawford as positively as it could considering all the unflattering information we have been fed on her these past few decades.
I had the opposite reaction to Lang’s Crawford. As I said in my OP, I really only knew the “Mommy Dearest” version of the real-life Joan, which paints her as a one-dimensional villainess with no context whatsoever. Certainly, in this show she’s depicted as narcissistic and alcoholic as well, but it at least it relates some of the background that made her become that.
Joan confiding to Bette that she’d been sexually molested by her step-father at 11 years old (which, from what I can find online, actually happened) goes a long way to explaining her control freak impulses. She never had any control over her life as a child, so she is obsessive of it as an adult.
The woman known as Lucille LaSeur had a horrendous early life, and becoming Joan Crawford was an escape from that hell. It was as much about escaping her dysfunctional past as it was about being a STAR! The end of her Hollywood career meant having to go back to being Lucille LaSeur, and being that miserable, put-upon little girl. I’d say that she desperately wanted to have real friends and real intimate relationships, but was too badly damaged at too early an age for that to ever happen.