If Davis was wrong, then what Crawford did on April 8, 1963, was accept an award on behalf of an absent winner and do it gracefully and well, and the story ended there, and everything that came after was Davis’s grief finding a shape it could live in.
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CLOSING: THREE WOMEN AND THE TRUTH THAT OUTLASTED THE NIGHT
The story of the 35th Academy Awards has been told as a story about Joan Crawford and Bette Davis—about rivalry, about ambition, about what women do to each other in competitive environments. That telling is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete.
Anne Bancroft is the center of what actually happened on April 8, 1963. She gave a performance of lasting distinction in *The Miracle Worker*. She was recognized for it with the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was unable to attend the ceremony because she had a prior theatrical commitment. Someone accepted the award for her.
That someone happened to be the co-star of the woman who had lost. That co-star happened to have a documented history of mutual hostility with the woman who had lost. That the evening could be read as a performance of triumph—by one woman, at the expense of another—was partly a function of the specific biographical context that surrounded the three of them and partly a function of how human beings read public ceremonies for subtext.
Bette Davis’s performance in *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* was recognized with a nomination and is remembered as one of the defining pieces of acting in her career. The film itself, which she and Crawford made under modest conditions and at reduced salaries, became one of the most commercially successful and culturally influential pictures of their generation. It launched a subgenre. It was added to the National Film Registry. Akira Kurosawa named it among his favorite films.