Both readings might be partially true. That is frequently how human behavior works—it carries meaning that is simultaneously legible and ambiguous, simultaneously an act and a performance of an act, simultaneously what it is and what the observer needs it to be.
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THE PARADOX THAT MAKES THE STORY ENDURE
The reason this story has accumulated the cultural weight it has accumulated—why it was the subject of a prestige television series in 2017, why it continues to generate articles and analyses sixty-plus years after the ceremony—is not simply that it is a story about two famous women who didn’t like each other.
The story endures because it holds a genuinely unresolvable tension at its center.
Joan Crawford stood at the microphone and accepted an Oscar she had not won, in a category for which she had not been nominated, for a film she had made alongside the woman who had been nominated and had lost. This is documented fact. The image of it is available to view.
Bette Davis said Crawford had helped engineer the outcome—that the acceptance was the visible tip of a campaign that had cost Davis the award she believed she had earned. This is a claim that has never been corroborated by independent evidence.
The true story is that Anne Bancroft won the award for a performance of genuine distinction, that she was unable to attend the ceremony because she had a stage commitment, and that Joan Crawford accepted the award on her behalf. The rest—the campaign, the malice, the revenge—is either real and undocumented, or a compelling story that a grieving, angry woman told herself and eventually told the world.