The weighting incident—the claim that Crawford wore a weighted corset or girdle during the sequence in which Davis’s character drags her across the floor, knowing that Davis had back problems—appears in biographical literature as an allegation attributed to Davis, not as an independently confirmed fact. It has entered popular culture as settled history. The evidence for it is Davis’s own account, offered retrospectively.
Neither woman denied the existence of tension. Both acknowledged, in the accounts they later gave, that filming was not comfortable. But the specific theatrical cruelties that have decorated every retelling of this production are largely drawn from one source—Bette Davis—speaking at a considerable temporal remove from the events described.
What is indisputable is the result of their collaboration. The film, released in the fall of 1962, was a genuine commercial and critical event.
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THE FILM AND ITS RECEPTION
*What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* premiered in Cincinnati on October 31, 1962, and opened in New York on November 6 and Los Angeles on November 7. It recouped its production costs by November 18—less than two weeks after opening in the major markets. By February 1963, it had grossed four million dollars. Its final American theatrical rentals reached approximately nine million dollars.
Against a budget of roughly one million dollars, this was an exceptional return.
The critical reception was divided, and the division is itself instructive. Bosley Crowther at *The New York Times*, Philip Scheuer at the *Los Angeles Times*, and Brendan Gill at *The New Yorker* were largely negative—the camp elements of the film struck them as excessive or undignified, or both. Variety was positive, as was Richard Coe at the *Washington Post*. *Monthly Film Bulletin* appreciated what Aldrich was doing with genre. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa later cited the film as one of his favorites, a fact that has done significant retrospective work on the film’s critical reputation.