She was released from MGM in June 1943, after eighteen years. The parting was described as amicable by the people who had reason to describe it that way. She took her talent and her work ethic and her considerable name recognition and signed with Warner Bros.
This is where the two stories intersect—because Warner Bros. was already the home of Bette Davis.
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RUTH ELIZABETH DAVIS AND THE ROAD TO WARNER BROS.
Bette Davis was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts—which means she and Crawford were, discrepant birth records aside, essentially contemporaries. Her father left when she was seven. Her mother, Nina, supported the family by working as a photographer and later as a housemother at boarding schools. Davis attended Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and developed an early and serious passion for theater.
She made her Broadway debut in 1929 in *Broken Dishes*, moved to Hollywood in 1930, and spent a frustrating year at Universal before George Arliss, one of the era’s most respected character actors, chose her for a role in *The Man Who Played God* (1932). Warner Bros. signed her to a contract. She would remain there for approximately eighteen years.
The progression of her Warner Bros. career was not a smooth upward line. It was a series of fights—with the studio over material, with producers over control, occasionally with co-stars over professional territory. She was cast repeatedly in films she found beneath her abilities and forced to make them by the contract system’s coercive logic. In 1936, she refused to accept a role she considered unworthy and traveled to England to make films for a British production company. Warner Bros. sued her. She lost, and was ordered by an English court to pay the studio eighty thousand dollars in legal costs and return to her contract.