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Bette Davis and Howard Hughes, at a fundraiser at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1938.
From Everett Collection.
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Together, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis accumulated added than 200 blur credits, assuming all address of top ball onscreen over the advance of their storied, Oscar-winning careers. So it is a attestation to their adventurous personalities and alienated peculiarities that the women managed to accomplish even added theatrics offscreen—detonating so abounding diva tantrums and, frankly, “batshit crazy” claimed incidents that Feud administrator Ryan Murphy couldn’t even get to all of them in eight action-packed hours of television. (People accept alleged Dames Crawford and Davis bold, brash, and ballsy—but no one has anytime accused the two of getting boring.) In accolade to the larger-than-life characters, we’ve aggregate a few absorbing belief about the stars that did not accomplish the Feud cut—which doesn’t beggarly they’re any beneath jaw-dropping than what did.
Henry Fonda and the Sequined Jockstrap
Murphy’s Feud showcases Joan Crawford (as played by Jessica Lange) as an aboveboard animal creature—a representation accepted as authentic by the actress’s own statements, countless affairs, and atrocious affairs (including, but far from bound to, the time she absorbed a teenaged Jackie Cooper if she was in her 30s). While filming the affair Daisy Kenyon in 1947 with Henry Fonda, though, Crawford reportedly attempted to abduct her quiet co-star in a address that encapsulates her audacious sexuality.
According to assorted reports, Crawford enlisted the apparel administration to distinctively actualize a red-sequin amateur strap, which the extra captivated in a box and presented to her co-star. Fonda did not accede the allowance until he was affected to—while he was accustomed Crawford up the stairs in one scene, the extra leaned over and asked Fonda to archetypal the present in private.
“When she aside the invitation, I about abandoned her,” Fonda said afterward, according to Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud.
Coincidentally enough, Davis aswell had her own early-career adventurous break with Fonda.
In 1927, Fonda and a teenaged Davis were alien by a alternate associate one evening. Fonda declared the affair with his approaching Jezebel brilliant (per the Davis adventures Dark Victory), abandoning how, while abandoned with Davis that night, he leaned in and gave Davis “a beak on the lips.”
Days later, Davis played a antic on Fonda, sending him a letter that read, “I’ve told Mother about our admirable acquaintance calm in the moonlight. She will advertise the assurance if we get home.”
Fonda recalled thinking, “ ‘Holy bits . . . One kiss and I’m engaged.’ That’s how aboveboard I was. And that’s what a devil Bette Davis could be at 17.” Fonda continued, “For years, whenever I saw Bette Davis I’d accord her a advanced berth.”
Blackmailing Bette
While affiliated to aboriginal bedmate Ham Nelson, Davis met and agitated on a abrupt activity with Howard Hughes—the affluent playboy, aviator, and aberrant whom Davis helped plan through a aeon of impotence. According to Charles Higham’s Bette: The Life of Bette Davis, the actress, “who was not admirable and appropriately was not threatening, told her accompany she managed to advice him affected his [problem in the bedroom]. She was candied and affectionate and acceptable to Hughes—she set his apperception chargeless of anxiety.”
Nelson bent wind of the activity and assassin a clandestine detective to wire the couple’s Coldwater Canyon Drive home for sound. (James Spada’s Davis adventures More Than a Woman confirms the recording, admitting it counters that Nelson fabricated it with the advice of a brother-in-law.) Very anon after, Nelson confronted Davis and Hughes and blackmailed both by aggressive to accord the columnist the recording—which accustomed Davis’s affair and Hughes’s struggles with impotence.
According to Ed Sikov’s Dark Victory, and Vik Greenfield, Davis’s abettor at the time, Hughes paid Nelson $70,000 to abort the recording and Davis took out a accommodation to accord Hughes. Hughes is said to accept accustomed Davis’s payment, but in a civil gesture, beatific Davis a red rose every September on the commemoration of the recording.
Underdressing for Oscar
As Feud admirers apperceive by now, Joan Crawford took a amazing bulk of pride in her appearance—summoning abounding hair, makeup, and custom-coordinated accessories for aggregate from a mail auto to a red-carpet premiere. Davis was the adverse of a arrogant cine star, however, acceptable in aspersing make-unders and acrimonious accouterment so amiss that, on one occasion, she affronted her absolute industry.
It was 1936, and the Academy Awards were not yet the high-glam, red-carpet caricature they are now—but they were still Hollywood’s a lot of important evening. And Davis, who was nominated for Dangerous, absolved into the commemoration cutting a navy-blue printed banquet dress she had recycled from her closet. The apparel best was so breezy that humans told the extra to her face that “it was an insult to the Academy.” But Davis was able to rationalize the decision, according to Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. “One anchorman wrote that I wore an bargain housedress. That was not true. My dress was simple but expensive; it was a banquet dress. It ill-fitted the break perfectly, because I didn’t feel I adapted to win.”
Although afraid by Davis’s dress, Joan Crawford couldn’t abide accepting a affront in. Rather than congratulate Davis on her Oscar win, Crawford artlessly said, “Dear Bette, what a admirable frock!”
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Joan Crawford holding her Academy Award for Best Actress in bed, March 1946.
By Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
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Leave it to Joan to be present to acquire anyone else’s Oscar, but not her own. In Crawford’s second-greatest Academy Award diva maneuver, the extra was so assertive that she would lose out to adolescent appointee Ingrid Bergman (who was up for The Bells of St. Mary's) in 1946 that she affected the flu.
“I was hopeful, scared, apprehensive, so abashed I wouldn’t bethink what I capital to say, abashed at the anticipation of searching at those people,” Crawford said, according to Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. Referring to her competition, the actress—nominated for Mildred Pierce—said, “I can attempt with a assistant babe [Greer Garson], with a baggage [Gene Tierney], an amnesiac [Jennifer Jones], but not with a nun.”
So rather than appear the ceremony, Crawford listened to the appearance by radio from home, cutting a artist nightgown and demography swigs from a canteen that was not doctor-prescribed. Crawford getting Crawford, though, she had put calm a back plan in the accident that she did win—so that she would not absence out on the aureate columnist opportunity.
Per Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud, the additional that Crawford was declared the best-actress champ afterwards all, she “jump[ed] out of bed” and “called for her beautician and architecture man, on alarm in the next room.” Later that night, Crawford airish for photos in bed, in abounding hair and makeup, with her Oscar—photos that just happened to end up on the foreground page of the bi-weekly the next day. And although Crawford’s “flu” kept her from the Oscars, it did not accumulate her from the all-night afterparty, which she hosted at her home.
Bette Davis: Dog Whisperer
Never allege Bette Davis of getting annihilation beneath than thorough. While prepping for 1946’s A Stolen Life, Davis was so black with the dog casting adverse her that she spent an absolute day recasting it herself. In the film, Davis played a sister impersonating her asleep twin, and the extra was assertive that the casting of the dog was crucial.
“It can’t be any dog. . . the dog [needs to know] I’m an amateur if he smells me,” Davis said, according to Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. “For that, we charge a dog that can act.”
The film’s director, Curtis Bernhardt, accepted that the extra was hellbent on hand-picking her basset co-star.
“She spent an absolute day auditioning dogs,” Bernhardt said. “Every able and semi-professional basset in Los Angeles was brought into Warner’s. Big dogs, baby dogs, poodles, schnauzers, cocker spaniels, collies . . . Eventually, she best a wire terrier.”
When it came time to film, though, Davis’s ambitious attributes annoyed even her bristling adolescent actor.
“When they got to cutting the scene, the little activity was abashed of Bette,” Bernhardt said. “He wouldn’t go abreast her, let abandoned that appears to smell her.”
Thrill-Seeking with Clark Gable at Coconut Grove
Neither Joan Crawford nor Clark Gable is remembered for getting decidedly affectionate to either of their abounding spouses. But one of their contemporaries, biographer Adela Rogers St. Johns, was abashed to ascertain just how arrant the eight-time co-stars were in administering an activity if she bent the duo affected in a acrimonious bender of chicane at the Coconut Grove . . . simple anxiety abroad from their spouses at the time, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ria Langham.
St. Johns declared the amour arena in her account (via Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud):
[Gable’s] wife and [Crawford’s] husband were sitting out front at a table. I literally felt stunned [when] I found them stuck to each other, behind the bandstand. Clark had his back to me and she had her legs wrapped around him, in a position that only a supple dancer like Joan could assume. I yelled something stupid at them. They straightened themselves out, adjusted their clothes, and Joan, when she saw it was only me, said, ‘Adela! Darling’!
Crawford may not have been militant about marriage vows, but she was a stickler for etiquette. The next day, the actress followed up with St. Johns by sending her flowers.
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