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Entertainment March 2, 2017
A juicy feud is never out of fashion and the battle between old time Hollywood legends Joan Crawford and Bette Davis was so fierce that it has inspired a new TV series.
“Feud: Bette and Joan,” starting Sunday March 5 on FX, is the latest drama from “American Horror Story” and “Glee” producer Ryan Murphy and charts the lifelong hatred of each other felt by “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?” co-stars Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange).
The scheming stars spent much of their lives trying to outdo each other, especially with biting put downs. Here are some of the meanest insults they dished out about each other.
“I wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.”
“Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why she (Joan Crawford) always plays ladies.”
“The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.'”
“She has slept with every male star at MGM, except Lassie.”
“Joan Crawford? I wouldn’t sit on her toilet.”
“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good!”
“Miss Davis was always partial to covering up her face in motion pictures. She called it ‘art.’ Others might call it camouflage—a cover-up for the absence of any real beauty.”
“Bette will play anything, so long as she thinks someone is watching. I’m a little more selective than that.”
“She may have more Oscars … She’s also made herself into something of a joke.”
“She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.”
“Did you see the picture? (‘The Star’) Bette looked so old, and so dreadfully overweight.”
“Sure, she stole some of my big scenes, but the funny thing is, when I see the movie (Baby Jane) again, she stole them because she looked like a parody of herself, and I still looked like something of a star.”
The eight episode series focuses mainly on clashes between the larger-than-life pair when they filmed Baby Jane in 1962. But it will also examine the difficulties they faced in the entertainment industry as they got older, something still faced by women in Hollywood today.
“That’s a big part of this show,” Lange said at the show’s press launch. “What Hollywood does to women as they age, which is just a microcosm of what happens to women generally as they age, you know. Whether you want to say they become invisible, or they become unattractive or they become undesirable, or whatever it is. And I think with this, we’ve touched on that in a very profound way. And, I mean, Joan was ten years younger when this takes place than I am now, and yet her career was finished because of her age.”
The biggest challenge for Lange and Sarandon was finding the real people behind the facades of their characters.
“The thing with Joan is she was never not on,” Lange added. “When she was in public, she was performing, so it was very hard to find a moment where you could like really discern what the heart and soul of that character was.”
Sarandon was helped by the fact that producer Ryan Murphy had met Davis and shared his memories of the star with her.
Murphy said at the press launch, “I was interested in something a little deeper, and a little bit more emotional and painful. I think ultimately what happened to both women is very painful. I got to know Bette Davis. I had a very minor relationship with her and got to spend time with her, and the thing about her is you go into something like that expecting a very larger-than-life camp figure, which she helped, I think, propagate. And she told me when I talked to her, you know, that she felt that she was never going to be anybody unless somebody could impersonate her. So in the public view, she rarely turned that off.
“She felt that was important for her survival, but when I got across from her one on one and I got to one day spend four hours talking with her, she was not that person at all. She was not camp. She was not broad. She was very emotional and real, and all of those things were in the water when we began to write the show.”
The rest of the cast includes Catherine Zeta-Jones as actress Olivia de Havilland, Stanley Tucci as studio head Jack Warner, Alfred Molina as director Robert Aldrich, and Judy Davis as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper.
A second series of “Feud” is already in development but that one will reportedly feature on a feuding couple from British royalty – Charles and Diana.
