What the book did produce was a new lens through which Crawford’s entire career was subsequently read. The controlled perfectionism that had defined her professional life—the attention to image, the meticulous self-presentation, the ability to manage any room she was in—was recast, through the memoir’s frame, as the public face of a private tyranny. The woman whose discipline had been admired became, after 1978, a woman whose discipline had been wielded as a weapon against the people in her power.
Bette Davis defended Crawford against the memoir’s portrait, at least partially and on at least some occasions. This fact has been variously interpreted: as genuine conviction, as complicated ambivalence, as the solidarity of one professional woman toward another who could no longer defend herself, as the rivalry’s final irony. Davis’s remarks about Christina Crawford’s book do not represent a complete recantation of everything she had said about Joan Crawford over the previous decades; they represent a more specific claim that the private monster Crawford’s daughter described did not align with the professional colleague Davis had known.
Whether Davis was in a position to assess Crawford’s private behavior is a separate question from whether her defense was sincere.
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THE FX SERIES AND THE MAKING OF A LEGEND
The FX limited series *Feud: Bette and Joan*, which premiered in March 2017, was produced by Ryan Murphy and featured Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis. The series was well received by critics—it received multiple Emmy nominations and won several—and reached an audience substantially larger than the audience that had followed the original events in 1963.