The attribution of the rivalry to a single founding incident—Franchot Tone, or the 1933 press coverage, or the 1935 dress remark—is probably less accurate than understanding it as the product of an industry that systematically compared women to each other, that positioned them as competitors for a limited pool of prestige, and that found the suggestion of personal animosity commercially useful.
Davis was not wrong that she had been compared unfavorably with Crawford at various points in her career, nor was Crawford wrong that she had received less critical recognition than Davis despite comparable commercial achievement. These are real grievances about real structural conditions, filtered through the specific personalities and histories of two specific women.
Whether Crawford did what Davis said she did—whether she actually picked up the phone and urged Academy members to vote against Davis’s nomination—is a question to which the available record provides no confirmed answer. It is possible. It is also possible that Davis, furious at a loss she experienced as unjust, found in Crawford a comprehensible explanation for an outcome that was ultimately produced by the private, anonymous decisions of thousands of voters.
Human beings construct narratives out of the events of their lives. The narratives that stick are usually the ones that make sense of things that would otherwise remain simply painful. “I lost because the voters preferred Bancroft” is less satisfying than “I lost because my rival sabotaged me.” Both might be true. One of them is certainly true. The other cannot be confirmed.