Both possibilities are interesting. Both tell us something about Hollywood, about ambition, about what it cost women to be as ambitious as Davis and Crawford were. Neither can be confirmed.
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THE THREE WOMEN AND WHAT THEY ACTUALLY ACHIEVED
Any account of the 1963 Best Actress category that focuses primarily on the Crawford-Davis dynamic risks losing sight of what was actually accomplished on screen by the women involved.
Anne Bancroft’s performance as Annie Sullivan in *The Miracle Worker* is not famous because of what happened at the ceremony. It is famous because of what she did with the role—the physical intensity of the pump-scene sequence, the nine-minute dining room confrontation that took five days and three cameras to film, the way she made Sullivan’s exhausted tenderness visible underneath the woman’s relentless pedagogical determination. Critics writing at the time noted her athleticism, her humor, and her compassion. Critics writing about the film now note that she found in Sullivan something specific and irreducible—not a saint, not a martyr, but a teacher doing difficult work with the tools available to her.
Bette Davis’s performance as Baby Jane Hudson is not famous because of what Crawford allegedly did or didn’t do. It is famous because of what Davis found in the character—the grotesque comic precision of the child-star mannerisms applied to a sixty-something woman, the terrifying ease with which she moved between Jane’s delusion and Jane’s cruelty, the way she made the character simultaneously pitiable and genuinely frightening. Film critics who have written about Davis’s work consistently identify Baby Jane as one of the great late performances in American cinema—not a career-ending humiliation, but a career-extending transformation.