The scent of stale powder and desperation hangs thick in the air-conditioned chill of Stage Five. Outside the soundstage, 1962 Hollywood simmers, but inside, it’s a glacier. Two queens reign over fractured kingdoms: Joan Crawford, spine ramrod straight in her meticulously tailored suit, her famous cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, applies mascara with surgical precision. Across the vast, cavernous space, Bette Davis sits hunched, a cigarette dangling from lips painted a defiant crimson, her famously expressive eyes narrowed to slits as she studies a script she already knows by heart. The script is "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" – a grotesque fairy tale about faded stars trapped in mutual hatred. Life, as they say, imitates art with cruel precision.
Their feud isn't whispered. It thrums in the silence between takes, vibrates in the clipped "Miss Crawford" and "Miss Davis" exchanged with frosty politeness. It’s in the way Joan’s hand trembles slightly as she adjusts a seam, a tremor betraying the iron will beneath. It’s in Bette’s raspy chuckle, a sound like gravel scraping bone, aimed just loud enough to carry. Director Robert Aldrich sweats bullets, caught between twin forces of nature long past their prime but still capable of levelling cities.
The Roots of the Rancor:
It wasn't born on this set. The animosity festered for decades, fed by slights real and imagined. Joan, the self-made goddess, clawing her way up from chorus lines and poverty, marrying studio heads, embodying glamorous resilience. Bette, the blazing talent, the fearless artist who defied moguls, worshipped for her uncompromising genius and feared for her volcanic temper. Both fought tooth and nail in an industry designed to chew up women over thirty. Now, in their fifties, the roles have dried up. The fan mail trickles. The studios see them as relics. This film, this grotesque spectacle of their own decline, is their last, desperate grasp at relevance. The irony is acid on the tongue.
The Battleground:
The Oscar Snub: Joan, ever strategic, campaigns fiercely behind the scenes. Bette, convinced of her own superior performance, scoffs at the politicking. When Joan isn’t nominated, the blame lands squarely on Bette’s doorstep – a sabotage Joan believes is personal, vicious, and utterly Davis.
The Pepsi Machine: Joan, newly widowed wife of Pepsi-Cola’s chairman, has a vending machine installed on set. A symbol of her power? A convenience? Bette sees it as Joan flaunting her corporate connections, a vulgar intrusion. She kicks it. Hard. The metallic clang echoes Joan’s fury.
The Weight of the Corpse: In the film’s climax, Bette’s character must drag Joan’s seemingly lifeless body. Joan, convinced Bette is deliberately making it harder by tensing or adding dead weight, fills her pockets with rocks. The take is brutal, physically punishing. Aldrich nearly has a coronary. The air crackles with unspoken venom.
The Public Barbs: Off-set, the war continues. Joan plants negative items in gossip columns. Bette gives interviews dripping with thinly veiled contempt for Joan’s "manufactured" persona and lack of true acting chops. They snipe at each other’s parenting, their marriages, their fading beauty. The feud becomes bigger than the film, a lurid public spectacle feeding the very industry that discarded them.
The Twilight Struggle
Ryan Murphy’s "Feud" doesn’t just catalogue the slaps and the scheming. It digs into the aching vulnerability beneath the armour. Lange’s Joan is a masterpiece of controlled panic – the terror of invisibility masked by impeccable grooming and steely resolve. You see the calculation, yes, but also the raw fear of being forgotten. Sarandon’s Bette is a force of nature, all jagged edges and defiant intelligence, but also radiating a profound loneliness. Her talent is undeniable, her frustration palpable. The series lays bare the systemic rot: the studio heads who pit them against each other for publicity (Jack Warner, played with reptilian charm by Stanley Tucci, smirking as he fans the flames); the journalists who feast on their carcasses; the societal expectation that women of a certain age should simply vanish.
The Legacy
The cameras stopped rolling on "Baby Jane," but the feud echoed for years, a sad coda to brilliant careers. "Feud" shows us the tragic grandeur of it. These weren't just catty rivals; they were titanic artists, survivors navigating a hostile world that adored them only as long as they were young and bankable. Their battle was fuelled by ego, yes, but also by a desperate, shared understanding of the abyss opening beneath their feet. Lange and Sarandon don’t merely impersonate; they channel the essence – the desperation, the brilliance, the profound, corrosive bitterness – of Crawford and Davis. It’s less a docudrama, more a haunting requiem for two stars who burned too bright for Hollywood to handle, left to tear each other apart in the encroaching dark. The Pepsi machine is gone, Stage Five is silent, but the echoes of their clash – a symphony of ambition, fear, and mutual destruction – still resonate in the hills above Los Angeles.