What she did say, in accounts from the time, was that she was thrilled to win. The Wikipedia page for the ceremony notes that Crawford later presented the Oscar to Bancroft in New York on May 7, 1963—twenty-eight days after the ceremony. The handoff was apparently made in person, quietly, with no particular theatrical production attached to it.
The story of the 1963 Oscar night, as it has been told and retold, has a tendency to make Bancroft peripheral—a name read from an envelope, a prize handed to someone else, the occasion for a drama she was not present for. Her actual achievement was substantial. *The Miracle Worker* gave her the Academy’s highest acting recognition for a performance she had spent years developing, first on stage and then on screen. The film itself received five nominations and won two awards. Her co-star Patty Duke won Best Supporting Actress for the same film—making *The Miracle Worker* the first film since *On the Waterfront* in 1955 in which a film earned both acting Oscars in competitive categories in a single year.
Bancroft was not a prop in the Crawford-Davis story. She was the winner.
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THE LONG AFTERMATH: HOW THE LEGEND GREW
Joan Crawford died on May 10, 1977. Within months, her adopted daughter Christina Crawford published *Mommie Dearest* (1978), a memoir that described a childhood of abuse and neglect at Crawford’s hands. The book was a sensation—it sold millions of copies, was adapted into a film in 1981 with Faye Dunaway in the title role, and permanently complicated the public image of a woman who could no longer respond to it.