She remained on Pepsi’s board until 1973, participating in board meetings and company events. This is not a footnote to her career—it is a substantial portion of her professional life during the period that immediately followed the studio years and preceded the *Baby Jane* years. When she signed on for *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?* in 1962, she was not a faded star desperately grasping at relevance. She was a woman with an active corporate position and a sustained public profile who saw in the Aldrich project an opportunity to work in the medium she had originally built her reputation in.
The fact that she took fifteen percent of net profits rather than her usual flat fee reflects sound financial judgment as much as professional desperation—the film’s eventual box office returns vindicated the decision financially, and her calculation that the film was worth the risk proved accurate.
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THE INDUSTRY THAT REWARDED DIFFICULTY IN MEN AND PENALIZED IT IN WOMEN
One of the more instructive patterns in the Crawford-Davis rivalry narrative—and in the way it has been processed by subsequent commentary—is the asymmetry in how the two women’s professional stubbornness has been treated.
Davis’s notorious difficulty—her fights with Warner Bros., her refusal of unsuitable material, her English lawsuit, her confrontational relationships with directors and producers—has been consistently treated in the biographical literature as evidence of her artistic integrity and her refusal to be compromised. It is cited as proof of her seriousness, her professionalism in the deepest sense, her commitment to standards that the studio system would have preferred she abandon.