Much has been said about the rivalry between movie superstars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis during the making of their film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Such is the extent of the public’s interest in their relationship that whole books have been written about their problems, and a successful play based on the feud toured the United Kingdom in 2012. For their part, neither Bette nor Joan made any secret of their dislike for one another and made more than the odd snide comment over the years that followed the making of the film.
In the early 1970s, Bette was interviewed by Dick Cavett and told a story of being stung by a wasp during a trip to Scotland. Davis had suffered an allergic reaction after finding the insect in the sleeve of her dressing gown and jokingly Cavett asked if she thought Joan Crawford could have put it there. “No, that wouldn’t be something she would do,” replied Bette, and then a twinkle appeared in her eye. “Not a wasp,” she continued. “A gun maybe, but not a wasp!” The audience laughed wildly, but jokes aside, both Joan and Bette most certainly did not appreciate each other and felt they had nothing whatsoever in common.
Unfortunately, it would later become apparent that they had at least one thing in common – daughters who felt the need to air their grievances with their mothers in the shape of a kiss-and-tell book. The first, a scathing account entitled Mommie Dearest, was published in 1978 and written by Crawford’s daughter, Christina, who had been adopted by the divorced, single woman in 1940. The book was a biting – and often frightening – account of her life with Joan, and included stories of violent rages, abuse, humiliation and despair raged against not only Christina, but her adopted brother Christopher, too. The book told how the child was chastised for using wire hangers instead of padded ones; was spanked with a hairbrush so violently that it broke in half; and witnessed her brother being strapped to the bed in an effort to prevent him from sleepwalking.
Even Christmas – a time centred on loving and giving – was just another excuse for cruelty, according to the book, when Christina would be photographed surrounded by Christmas presents, only to find all but one of them promptly rewrapped and given away the moment the cameras were turned off. As if that wasn’t enough, Christina says she was then forced to write thank you cards for all the presents she had been unable to keep, which could take days due to her mother’s need for complete perfection in tone and grammar.
The childhood described by Christina was terrifying in every sense of the word and included being forced to eat portions of raw meat for dinner, which the child understandably hated. However, if she refused to swallow it, the meat would be wrapped up by her mother and kept for breakfast the next day. If that was pushed away also, out it would come for lunch until finally the child gave in and ate the putrid meal.
In the book, Christina also talked about the boyfriends her mother took over the years – all called “Uncle” by the child. From the age of nine she was mixing the gentlemen drinks, while her mother remained upstairs, readying herself for the evening ahead. Unfortunately, if the book is to be believed, while Crawford’s look, style and appearance meant a lot to her, she didn’t seem to care much about her daughter’s clothes, as demonstrated by one particular episode.
The story went that during a childish adventure, a young Christina stripped some wallpaper from her bedroom wall, but on realizing the severity of what she had done, tried to paste it back on, which just caused even more destruction. Unfortunately, the patch was discovered by a furious Crawford, who took her revenge by heading straight to Christina’s wardrobe, cutting her favourite yellow dress to shreds and forcing her to wear it for a week. If anyone asked why, she would have to tell them that it was because “I don’t like pretty things.”
After the abusive childhood described by Christina, she was shocked to discover that Crawford’s last swipe was to write both her and her brother Christopher out of her will, “for reasons which are well known to them”. Although they later successfully contested it, perhaps it was this final act that prompted Christina to write the book. However, while it may have brought her a sense of relief to get the story off her chest, with it came a great deal of letters and criticism from Joan’s fans, who refused to believe that the star could have been such an abusive person. Christina was perhaps prepared for such a backlash, but thankfully for her, along with the hate mail came dozens of other letters from people who had suffered similar childhoods, and for those people at least, the book seemed to have helped them deal with their own abusive past.
Such a subject was always going to elicit discussion and outrage, and it is interesting to note that Christina’s younger sisters, twins Cathy and Cindy, are both said to deny the claims against their mother, saying that she was firm, yes, but also loving and never abusive towards either of them. Her grandchildren (the twins’ children) agree, describing her as a normal grandmother who would babysit and make lunch for them. However, as Christina has publicly stated, there was an eight-year age gap between the twins and herself, which made it impossible for them to have seen anything of her own younger years before she went to boarding school at the age of ten. “[Cathy] couldn’t have known about my or Chris’s experience. She wasn’t there – she wasn’t even born when I was adopted,” she told the Guardian in 2008.
As well as the twins’ denials, several friends of Joan Crawford (including first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr) also came forward to say that they had been unaware of any abuse, but on the flip-side came claims by former staff members, who said that they themselves had witnessed wrongdoings in the Crawford household, though no one was apparently brave enough to say anything about it at the time. Along with those accounts came several similar ones from unnamed “friends” who claimed to have witnessed the cruelty at first hand, though once again they did not raise the subject with Crawford, claiming it would have been futile and could have resulted in the abuse becoming even more intense.
Crawford’s son Christopher gave his own take on the situation in October 1978, during an interview with the Los Angeles Times. In the short feature he described how his adopted mother had once held his hand in the fireplace when she discovered he had been playing with matches, and revealed that he had been so unhappy that he had even run away from home on more than one occasion.
As if that was not bad enough, Christopher is reported to have said that he was sure Joan had never actually loved him, and that when he became a father, she held her granddaughter for just a few seconds before harshly handing her back. Then later, when his youngest daughter was born, the little girl needed urgent medical treatment for which he could not afford to pay. Apparently, Christopher phoned his mother for help, and during the call she told him that his daughter was not her granddaughter because “You were adopted.” If this was indeed a true story, it is no wonder then that this was the end of any “relationship” Christopher ever had with Joan Crawford.
While some would argue that the validity of Christina Crawford’s book cannot be 100 per cent confirmed, it also cannot be denied that Joan Crawford was a volatile woman who seemed to enjoy confrontation. Her public spats with Bette Davis were legendary, of course, but it did not stop there and she would often take swipes at other younger actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, for whom she seemed to have a particular distaste. But while there is every chance that the stories about Christina’s childhood really could have happened, it is interesting to note that Crawford’s many fans are still as adamant as ever that the woman they continue to adore was not the one portrayed in the book.
Of course by the time Mommy Dearest was published, the subject of the book was no longer living, which at least meant that Joan Crawford would not be personally affected by it. However, the next tell-all book came as a deep shock, particularly as the parent in question was Bette Davis, and she was still very much alive.
In 1985, while the star of Dark Victory and All About Eve was battling numerous health problems including recovering from a stroke, she was shocked to discover that her daughter, B. D. Hyman, had published a book about their fraught relationship. Many people assumed straight away that it would be written in the same tone as Mommie Dearest, but they were mistaken. While Christina Crawford’s book was full of tales of childhood physical abuse, Hyman’s volume, My Mother’s Keeper, did not accuse Bette of being in any way an abuser. Instead, it blamed her for trying to control her adult daughter’s life to such a degree that it was almost unbearable.
It cannot be disputed that Bette Davis was a force with which to be reckoned; she was a woman who had no fear of standing up to the studio or fellow actors and actresses at a time when it was relatively unknown to do so. Therefore, it is easy to imagine that she was a woman who liked to have a say in her daughter’s life too. However, in fairness to Bette, this could be said for most mothers, and yet children who are not in the public eye tend to complain to friends and siblings, rather than put their thoughts into print.
As well as stories that accused Bette of trying to control her daughter’s decisions, the book also detailed how Bette was a victim of assault by her then husband Gary Merrill, who had adopted B. D. as a child. It should be noted, however, that Merrill later denied such stories, stating that the author had been motivated by “cruelty and greed”.
My Mother’s Keeper portrayed Davis as a drunken party animal who made a fool of herself at various public events, but the stories – seen through the eyes of B. D. – seemed to take many events out of context, seeing what many thought to be funny moments as something more sinister or contrived. In fact, so concerned were Bette’s friends on reading these stories that they came forward to say that they had witnessed some of the parties and events described in the book, but they had seen things happening in a completely different way; that the events that were embarrassing to B. D. were actually entertaining to the rest of the guests at the party.
The book caused a sensation, and adding to the gossip was the fact that the memoir had a vast amount of conversational quotes supposedly between mother and daughter. This prompted many to question just how many of their conversations could possibly be remembered word for word after all these years. The conversations themselves were often grim and did not portray Bette in the best light, describing how she could not cope with B. D. having a successful marriage and almost willed it to fail in order for her daughter to go back to loving Bette and Bette alone. Even the cover of the book was a cruel blow, showing the aged actress with grey hair, wrinkles and bright red lipstick “bleeding” all around her mouth.
During the book tour, B. D. was asked if her work bore any comparison to that of Christina Crawford’s memoir. She immediately denied that it did and went on to detail a story in which she had met Joan Crawford herself on the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. According to B. D., the actress recoiled from her intended handshake, looked her up and down, and demanded she have no contact with her children, twins Cindy and Cathy, as B. D. would surely be a terrible influence on them. This, said Crawford, was due to Bette’s daughter having an “unprotected childhood”.
B. D.’s distaste for Crawford was clear to see, and she then described that while Christina was always looking for love from her mother as a child, B. D. herself had for the most part a very happy childhood, full of love and devotion from her actress mother. “There was no child abuse,” B. D. said. “Mother never inflicted child abuse.” This raised questions from readers, because if her relationship with Bette had been a good one, why did she feel the need to write such a scathing account of their life together?
“I love my mother very much,” she said, before going on to explain that if she didn’t, she would never have written the book, never mind publish it. She also described how the publication was an attempt to present her side of the relationship in a way Bette “cannot burn, throw away or ignore”. According to B. D. her mother would frequently shut out everything she did not want to hear, and writing the book was the daughter’s (perhaps somewhat naive) way of trying to make Bette change.
It soon became apparent that one of the things that had spurred on the writing of the memoir was Bette’s relationship (or lack thereof) with B. D.’s husband Jeremy and their two sons Justin and Ashley. According to B. D., Davis was allegedly nasty and unpleasant to all members of her family, and even “terrorized” Justin and Ashley when they were small. This did not make sense to many people, particularly as B. D. was so quick to assure people that her own childhood was one of love and devotion.
What made her comments even more surprising was that Davis had worked on a movie (Family Reunion) with Ashley, during which time he had said some wonderful things about his grandmother. This, according to B. D., was as a result of having to say those things in order to keep her happy. Not so, said People magazine reader John Shea, who had worked with both Bette and Ashley on the set and found Davis to be very patient with her young grandson. According to Shea, each morning they would meet in Bette’s dressing room to rehearse, and every day would involve the same thing – a great deal of love, support and coaching from grandmother to grandson.
B. D. Hyman never received a great deal of public support after the publication of the book and this can be seen clearly through internet forums and YouTube comments even today. Of course, Christina Crawford had her fair share of detractors, too, but whereas she could be seen as having a definite reason for wanting to come out against her abusive mother, readers felt that the same just could not be said for Hyman. With no actual physical abuse involved, for the most part B. D. just came across as a disgruntled woman, angry at her controlling mother and anxious to get her to listen to her side of the story.
Sadly, it seemed clear to friends of Bette Davis that her heart had been broken by the supposed disloyalty expressed by her daughter, and her health seemed to get worse over the next few years before her death in 1989. For her part, Davis responded to My Mother’s Keeper in her own book, This ’n That, which was published in 1987. The book is a series of stories about Davis’s life and career, though she left it to the very end before mentioning her daughter’s work.
The last, untitled chapter is an open letter, which starts “Dear Hyman” and goes on to express a sheer disbelief at what had been written in her book. In the two-page note, Bette accuses her daughter of a lack of loyalty and appreciation for the life she was given, and says she believes her to be a great writer of fiction. The actress also states that she has no idea why the book was called My Mother’s Keeper and says that financially she had been a keeper of her daughter for many years, and continued to be so through the selling of the book. She also added a postscript which included many letters of support for the actress, before promptly disinheriting her disloyal daughter.
After both Joan and Bette’s deaths, public support has continued unabated and their films are still sold on DVD and watched on television. Both ladies are still legendary, and whether you love ’em or hate ’em, it is clear that they just don’t make them like Davis and Crawford any more. Despite claims put forward by their daughters, their fans still think of them as two of the greats, and it is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Bette Davis’s son Michael has continued to champion his mother’s memory as both a loving parent and wonderful actress, running her estate and hearing from countless fans who tell him even now just how much the actress has inspired and entertained them over the years. The same can be said for Crawford’s twins Cindy and Cathy, who have always denied their part in any awful childhood.
In spite of that, both B. D. Hyman and Christina Crawford have always stuck fast to the claims they made in their books, and B. D. actually went on to publish another volume, Narrow is the Way, in 1987. This book was not as popular, however, and she has since started her own church where she writes religious volumes and very rarely speaks publicly about her mother.