By Keith UhlichFeatures correspondent

A new TV series looks at Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’ legendary hatred for each other – but was it real? Keith Uhlich investigates.

People love a good underdog story, especially when it plays into a belief in our best natures. Witness the recent Oscar night best picture snafu involving Moonlight and La La Land, which briefly had the air of a disputed prizefight before the now-infamous envelope mix-up was resolved. A morning-after cover story in Variety, the influential Hollywood trade magazine, solidified the official narrative that people in Tinseltown really can put aside differences to get along. Yet there’s something about camaraderie that doesn't have quite the allure of bad blood, perhaps because it’s easier to believe that people are, at heart, more likely to trade barbs and blows than hugs and kisses.

Which brings us to the new US TV series Feud: Bette and Joan, a breezily entertaining eight-episode dissection of the tempestuous relationship between Hollywood Golden Age superstars Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange), which purportedly came to a boil on the set of their only film together, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962. Purportedly is the right word to use here because, as critic and Crawford/Davis expert Farran Smith Nehme suggests in a wide-ranging recent interview with MTV News’s Inkoo Kang, the actresses’ feud has become regarded as fact, when it may really be trumped up. Myth and truth are so intertwined that they may be impossible to untangle. But as Nehme says, “Everybody loves a catfight,” and the series – at least in the five episodes made available for preview – more than follows through on that.

It can still be fun to compare and contrast the various fictions and shreds of fact surrounding Davis, Crawford and Baby Jane – many of which are recounted in Shaun Considine’s 1989 book Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud, which Nehme notes is “very lively” but also “very erratically sourced”. Take all of the tales about Davis and Crawford with a grain of salt, from their reported dueling romantic trysts with the actor Franchot Tone in the 1930s to their catty back-and-forth exchanges in gossip rags. “You know who The Star was written about, don't you?” Davis is reported to have said of the 1952 film in which she played a washed-up movie queen. “Joan Crawford”. But there is some truth buried within all the exaggerations.

What can be stated with absolute certainty is that Feud’s producer, Ryan Murphy, embraces the many legends of the Crawford/Davis rivalry and uses them as a prism through which to reflect – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – on the status of women in what was then and still remains a male-dominated industry. As the series presents it, this feud is an idea more than a historic reality, a critical lens on the way in which women in Hollywood can be seen as powerful – and how they need an adversary to demonstrate their potency. If the feud didn’t exist (and it may not have to the extent Hollywood has made out) it would have been necessary to invent it.

Battle royale

There is no doubt that Joan and Bette were often flavours of the month one year, box office poison the next, and, that prior to their working together, each already had a major comeback film: Mildred Pierce for Joan in 1945, All About Eve for Bette in 1950. Though Feud the TV series mainly takes place in the 1960s, focusing on the actresses prepping for, filming, and dealing with the overwhelming reaction to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Murphy and company have fun teasing viewers with flashback glimpses of Davis and Crawford navigating the many tiers of Old Hollywood. Among the highlights, Sarandon gets to put her own ‘Bette Davis eyes’ to use in a recreation of the famous stairway death scene in The Little Foxes (1941). Lange, as Crawford, gets to do some temperamental acting-out on the set of the 1943 spy thriller Above Suspicion, breaking character and complaining to director Richard Thorpe about the inane script.

There’s a sense that both women are on separate but similar quests to prove themselves, or, perhaps to thicken their skins and survive in the high-testosterone Hollywood of the time. Davis, in particular, had a notoriously fraught relationship with Warner Bros studio head Jack Warner (played by a flamboyantly virile Stanley Tucci in the series), resulting from a 1936 contract dispute. Warner would go on to release Baby Jane, despite some protestation and, so Feud suggests, some more-than-lingering enmity about that previous conflict with Davis. If there's any impression in these flashback scenes that the women themselves are at odds, it’s mainly in the fact that they're both combatants in the same war for acceptance and success. It suggests that the feud was merely an assumption, a bit of drama the audience craved and which was manufactured to satisfy that craving and fuel their interest.

Considine’s book suggests Crawford courted Davis to appear alongside her in Baby Jane. In the TV series Crawford discovers the novel herself – it is not brought to her attention by the film’s eventual director Robert Aldrich as Considine’s book reports. It’s clear that the series is tilting the ‘truth’ of the situation toward a more feminist perspective – the woman taking complete agency.

Crawford, in the series as in the book, approaches Davis to discuss co-starring in the film backstage at the Broadway theatre where the latter is playing a supporting role in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. Sarandon’s Davis gives some sublimely squinted side-eye to Lange’s Crawford as she insists that she’s always wanted to work together. In a later scene, both Sarandon and Lange dance hilarious pas de deux of one-upsmanship as they recreate the famous photo of the two actresses signing the Baby Jane contracts – Crawford towering over a seated Davis, both actresses’ beaming eyes and plastic smiles barely concealing the simmering tensions underneath.

Armistice day

Feud gets to the set of the film midway through the first episode, where the series remains until episode three. This is, of course, where much of the juicy stuff is reported to have happened, from Davis intentionally kicking Crawford in the head (“I barely touched her!” seethes Sarandon) to Crawford wearing weights under her costume so that Davis, who had to drag her across the set in one scene, threw her back out. Basically, whatever rumours you’ve heard about the production are recreated adoringly in the series – Sarandon even gets to venomously spit out the famous line “But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair!” –  though there are further speculative additions as well.

Chief among these are Davis’s one-night-stand with Aldrich (a superbly harried Alfred Molina), which feels like it’s been added, not ineffectually, simply to stretch out the drama, as well as to further the series’ thesis about the high price women have had to pay in the Tinseltown boys club. And Crawford’s close friendship with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (the great Judy Davis), who is as much therapist as exploiter to the Baby Jane co-star, is an invention that somehow still feels accurate in this context. The duo’s chummy relationship reveals the parasitic nature of art and commerce, and how anyone, regardless of gender, could spin certain slanderous tidbits to their liking.  

The drama doesn’t stop after the series moves on from the production of Baby Jane, which became a big hit, reintroducing Crawford and Davis to a new generation. There are asides based on fact involving Crawford’s attendance at a successful preview of the film, as well as a steely ‘looking for work’ ad that Davis placed in a trade publication after the success of Baby Jane didn't immediately translate into more film offers, a pointed call-out of the industry's and ageism. And in the fifth episode, what will probably rank as Feud's highlight installment, Murphy and company recreate, in excruciating detail, the infamous 1963 Oscars ceremony where Bette was up for best actress, but Joan was not.

Revenge is a dish best served cold, and both the series and Considine’s book detail an icy plot by Joan to rob Davis of her moment of glory. Crawford butters up two other nominees, Geraldine Page (Sarah Paulson) and Anne Bancroft (Serinda Swan), insisting that she’ll act as their onstage proxy at the ceremony should they win, since neither ended up attending. And on the night, Crawford swans her way around the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, defiantly taking over the green room, turning a cold shoulder to Davis, and, finally sweeping past her Baby Jane co-star to accept the absent Bancroft’s gold statuette for The Miracle Worker. It’s a perfect storm of rancour and spite, the very flip side of the conciliatory Oscar competition between Moonlight and La La Land. There’s something to be said, however, for the way the malevolence and insincerity pulsing under every scene of Feud has a smidge more enticement – perhaps that lure is why many outside observers tried to play up the race for best picture between Moonlight and La La Land as a more heated battle than anyone actually involved with either film thought it to be. It’s easier to be bad than good, to be false rather than true. Ultimately, however, like a certain pair of stars, you can’t have one without the other.

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