Television also meant that Davis’s loss was public in a new way. She had sat in the auditorium knowing that millions of Americans were watching her name be read out, watching another woman accept the award she had hoped to receive, watching that other woman walk to a podium and smile. The public quality of the defeat—the specific visibility of it—added something to the experience that a more private ceremony would not have provided.
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LATER CAREERS: SURVIVING THE RIVALRY’S SHADOW
Whatever happened in the voting booths and in the political machinery of the 1963 Oscar season, both Crawford and Davis continued to work in the years that followed, and the work they did after *Baby Jane* deserves more than the brief accounting it usually receives in accounts of the rivalry.
Crawford made a string of genre films through the mid-1960s: *Strait-Jacket* (1964), *I Saw What You Did* (1965), *Berserk!* (1967). These were not the films of a woman restored to the first tier of Hollywood actresses; they were commercial genre vehicles that used her name recognition in the service of modestly budgeted productions. She brought to them the same professional seriousness she had brought to *Mildred Pierce*, and the films are better than their reputations suggest in part because of it. *Strait-Jacket* in particular has been reconsidered by horror historians as a competent piece of genre filmmaking that gives Crawford material she can work with.
She was also, during this period, increasingly managing her Pepsi obligations alongside her film work. The combination—celebrity spokesperson, board member, occasional actress—was not the career she had imagined in 1924 when she arrived at MGM, but it was a career, and she executed it with characteristic discipline.