She was famous and she was commercially viable and she was fifty-something years old in an industry that had always treated age as a female liability. The same was true of Davis. Both women, entering the 1960s, faced the same structural problem that has faced women in Hollywood before and since: the industry’s reluctance to invest in stories centered on women who were no longer young.
And then Robert Aldrich proposed a horror film.
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HENRY FARRELL’S NOVEL AND THE IDEA THAT SAVED TWO CAREERS
Henry Farrell published *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* as a novel in 1960. The story concerned two sisters—Blanche Hudson, a former film star now confined to a wheelchair after an accident, and Jane Hudson, Blanche’s faded child-star sister, who serves as Blanche’s caretaker and who, as the narrative progresses, reveals herself as both a figure of grotesque comedy and genuine menace. The relationship between the sisters was a study in codependency and cruelty, rendered in the language of camp Gothic.
The novel was optioned quickly, and the rights changed hands through a development process that eventually brought producer Robert Aldrich into the picture. Aldrich had made his reputation with hard-edged material—*Kiss Me Deadly* (1955), *Attack!* (1956)—and was known for working with strong personalities under difficult conditions. He had considered the project with multiple configurations before arriving at what, in retrospect, seems the obvious casting: the two most famous actresses of the previous three decades, playing versions of their public personas in a film about what happens to famous women when Hollywood is done with them.