What is documented is that she appeared. She received the award. She spoke briefly. And she did it all wearing a gown designed to command attention, in a room where Bette Davis—her co-star, her longtime adversary—was watching from the audience, having received no statuette of her own.
The question of whether Crawford had done anything to ensure that outcome is one we will return to. But first, we need to understand who these women were before they ever agreed to make a horror film together in a house in Los Angeles.
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LUCILLE LESUEUR BECOMES JOAN CRAWFORD
The woman who would eventually walk across the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to accept Anne Bancroft’s Oscar was born, in circumstances she spent decades obscuring, as Lucille Fay LeSueur—probably in 1905 or 1906, in San Antonio, Texas, though she later claimed 1908 and the record has never been definitively settled. Her father abandoned the family before she had reliable memories of him. Her stepfather, Henry Cassin, managed the Ramsey Opera House in Lawton, Oklahoma, which gave the young Lucille her first sustained exposure to performance—she watched vaudeville performers from the wings and absorbed something fundamental about how audiences worked.
The family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1917. She attended Catholic schools and worked as a household servant to pay tuition. She never received more than a rudimentary formal education; she later said she remained acutely self-conscious about this for the rest of her life, compensating through obsessive self-improvement and a voracious appetite for reading.