Bette Davis’s response to the memoir was itself revealing. Davis—who had spent decades engaged in open hostility with Crawford, who had said unkind things about her in print and in interviews—came, publicly, to Crawford’s partial defense. She told an interviewer that she did not believe the portrait Crawford’s daughter had painted, and that whatever her own conflicts with Crawford had been, she had recognized Crawford’s professionalism and talent.
This response has been read as generosity, as rivalry extending beyond the grave, as the solidarity of a generation of actresses toward one of their own, or as an honest and complicated recalibration of a long enmity. It is probably, in some proportion, all of these things.
The Davis quote most often cited about Crawford’s death—”Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”—has been widely repeated as characteristic of Davis’s unsparing wit. It has also been questioned in terms of its precise provenance; the number of things attributed to Bette Davis that she may or may not actually have said is considerable, and the most unsparing remarks tend to circulate most freely. What is documented is that Davis also said, in subsequent interviews, that she had respected Crawford’s talent and found her professional on the set of *Baby Jane*.
The 1989 publication of *Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud* by Shaun Considine—timed to arrive as both women were no longer living to contest it—crystallized the rivalry narrative into its most complete literary form. The book drew on oral history, industry gossip, and the accumulated record of both women’s public statements, and produced a dramatically satisfying account of two careers in conflict. It is the primary text from which the FX dramatization drew its structure, and it is the source through which most contemporary references to the rivalry have been filtered.