Bette and Joan: the feud that sexism created
This analysis is based on Ryan Murphy’s series Feud, which may not be completely accurate — but it’s the newest and brightest light on the subject.
Almost everything we have today about one of the most famous feuds of the 20th century are unanswered questions. What was, really, the root of the animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford? Did it start during the shooting of “What ever happened to Baby Jane” or long before?
Since we can’t ask the main subjects of the feud, and their direct descendants (as in Christina and B.D.) are not reliable sources at all, we can only rely on researchers. And one serious research was the origin of the book “Bette and Joan: the divine feud”, by Shaun Considine, and the first season of the TV series Feud.
According to episode 2 of “Feud: Bette and Joan”, the said feud started in the 1940s, when the two stars were under contract to Warner Brothers — until then Joan worked at MGM and Bette at Warner. Jack Warner hired Joan not because of her talent, but to stop Bette from demanding “too much”. As it’s said in the episode, now the studio had two bitches competing for roles.
Since the 1930s, Bette fought for the right to choose good scripts. She didn’t accept lousy scripts the studio sent to her — which caused several suspensions — and she didn’t accept being treated as a property of the studio. Now with Joan, Bette wouldn’t complain too much or she would lose work — and thus a rivalry was born.
It’s not a new tactic to put two women against each other to take power away from both and make the man in the picture — no pun intended — more powerful. Jack Warner did that again during the filming of “What ever Happened to Baby Jane?”, by convincing director Robert Aldrich to feed gossip columnist Hedda Hopper with made-up details about their feud. This way, not only there would be more buzz surrounding the picture, but also their performances would be better. Jack was ignoring the fact that women can play rage on camera, this isn’t a feeling you have to feed to appear in a performance.
Of course, the feud was also pushed on further by villainous, poisonous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper who, without talent to be more than a B / exploitation movie actress, decided to make a career out of destroying the lives of those who did have talent.
And to make sexism wide open, we have the moment when Bette’s daughter B.D. attacks her mother talking about how ridiculous she is, how she is actually envious of her daughter because she doesn’t get male attention anymore, and how she can’t accept she is not attractive any longer. It’s not simple teen rebellion. Sometimes sexism is so rooted in society that a mother and a daughter can become rivals, for real — there are several sick examples in fiction that take this belief further — or, like here, hypothetically.
In episode 3, Bette and Joan bond over their experiences as both mothers and daughters. Bette even asks how Joan disciplines her twin girls and Joan gives advice for Bette to discipline her teenage daughter, B.D. Later, in a restaurant, they recall their childhoods. Bette tells that she misses her mother, who had died in 1961, and says her mother was probably her only true female friend, to what Joan answers: “You’re lucky”.
In episode 5, after failing to be nominated for an Academy Award, Joan is poisoned by Hedda to campaign for the other nominated actresses, taking the almost certain Oscar away from Davis. Hedda and Joan then say bad things about Katharine Hepburn — the recluse outstanding actress who always skipped awards ceremonies and wore slacks when all other women wore skirts.
Then Crawford calls one of the nominees, Geraldine Page, and convinces her to give up attending the ceremony and let Joan collect the award if she wins. Later, in the ceremony, she says to Patty Duke, who had just won: “My goodness, an Oscar winner at 17. The only way to go is down”. We see now a poisonous Joan, a woman who learned since an early age that all women are enemies you should fight and diminish in order to find a place in the sun. It’s revolting, yes, but it’s actually sad.
A different — and timely — discussion on sexism
In episode 4 we see another sexist attitude towards a character. This time, the victim is Pauline Jameson, Aldrich’s secretary who writes a script for herself to direct. She presents the script to Joan, who mocks at her idea of being a woman director by saying, misinformed and biased:
“What do you think prevented the next great wave of woman directors? [referring to women directors of the silent era] Money. Money came along. Silents were low-cost, low-risk, a producer might shrug on the idea of an ingénue or girl editor taking a turn behind the camera. But when studios came to power, they moved women to the feminine work”.
Well, if Joan were a reader of Cine Suffragette, she would have known better.
Later in the episode, Pauline receives the same treatment from Aldrich — even though he seemed to support her idea — and he says, in an angry rage: “No one is gonna let a woman direct a picture”.
It’s interesting to notice that episode 4 was directed by a woman, Liza Johnson, and there is one character who fully supports Pauline’s idea: Mamacita (played by Jackie Hoffmann), Joan’s faithful housemaid. Mamacita says that, by 1970, more than 50% of the American population will be female, so the studios would need at least half of their films to be directed by women. If she was alive today, she would be disappointed.
In episode 8 Pauline tells a documentary maker that she was almost abandoning Hollywood when she found work behind the cameras in documentaries. Pauline, unlike Bette and Joan, had a happy ending — proving that fighting for your dreams is always better than fighting other women.
P.S.: Although Pauline Jameson was a real actress born in England in 1920, the character portrayed by Alison Wright is not this Pauline, since the real Ms. Jameson never worked for Robert Aldrich and never made a documentary.
