What Robert Aldrich recognized was that there was something in the juxtaposition of these two specific careers—their shared history, their known antagonism, their transition from major-studio royalty to the uncertain margins of middle age in Hollywood—that *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* could channel. The film is, among other things, about what the industry does to women. Blanche Hudson and Baby Jane Hudson are versions of the women the studio system produced—one glamorized into a helpless victim of her own beauty, one grotesqued into a monstrous relic of childhood fame. That both Davis and Crawford understood this about the material they were performing seems clear from the commitment they brought to it.
The film was not kind to either of them, in the way that the industry had not been kind. But it was honest about the conditions they had navigated, and it gave both of them something to do with the accumulation of that experience. That is not nothing. That may, in fact, be everything.
—
THE RIVALRY’S ORIGINS: WHAT CAN ACTUALLY BE ESTABLISHED
The biographical literature has identified several moments as the origins of the Crawford-Davis rivalry. Each one requires some scrutiny.
The 1933 account—that Davis was displeased when Crawford’s publicized divorce from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. drew press attention away from Davis’s first starring billing in *Ex-Lady*—is “attributed to some commentators” in the Far Out Magazine piece and carries no identified primary source. It is a plausible grievance, but it is not documented.
The 1935 Franchot Tone incident has the strongest primary-source support. Davis, in a 1987 interview, said explicitly: “I have never forgiven her for that, and never will.” What “that” referred to was the marriage between Crawford and Tone, whom Davis had been attracted to during their film work together. The quote is on record and attributed to Davis herself. Whether Tone had actually been romantically involved with Davis, whether Crawford had taken him deliberately to wound Davis, and whether the incident constitutes a founding grievance or a later interpretation of earlier friction are questions the quote alone cannot answer—but the quote exists, Davis said it, and it represents one of the few well-sourced data points in the rivalry’s supposed origins.