On the night of April 8, 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the nominees for Best Actress at the 35th Academy Awards were announced to the assembled audience: Anne Bancroft for *The Miracle Worker*, Bette Davis for *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, Katharine Hepburn for *Long Day’s Journey into Night*, Geraldine Page for *Sweet Bird of Youth*, and Lee Remick for *Days of Wine and Roses*.
Four of those women were in the room.
One was not. Anne Bancroft, the eventual winner, was three thousand miles away in New York City, appearing nightly on the stage of the Martin Beck Theatre in Bertolt Brecht’s *Mother Courage and Her Children*. She had a show to do. She could not leave.
Someone had to accept the award if her name was called.
That someone was Joan Crawford.
Crawford—who had co-starred with Bette Davis in *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, who had not been nominated for that film, who had no formal role in the Best Actress category that evening—walked to the microphone when Anne Bancroft’s name was read aloud. She accepted the Oscar on Bancroft’s behalf. She smiled. She thanked the Academy. She carried the statuette into the wings.
Somewhere in that auditorium, Bette Davis watched.
She had campaigned hard for the nomination she received. She had given what critics and many audiences recognized as one of the finest performances of her career. She had lost to a woman who wasn’t even in the building. And the award had been received by a woman who had every reason—if Davis’s own account of events is to be believed—to want her to lose.