What the allegation cannot explain, even if true, is the math of the result. Anne Bancroft won. She won because enough of the approximately 2,800 Academy voters found her performance in *The Miracle Worker* more compelling than the alternatives. Whether any of those votes were influenced by anything Crawford said to Academy members—in phone calls that have never been documented, in conversations that have never been verified—is unknowable. What is knowable is that Bancroft won, and her winning is explicable without Crawford’s alleged campaign.
The most honest account of the 1963 Best Actress race is one that acknowledges all of these things simultaneously: that Bancroft won for a genuinely distinguished performance; that Davis’s performance was also distinguished and the nomination was not undeserved; that Crawford’s acceptance of the award on Bancroft’s behalf created an image that Davis experienced as a deliberate insult; that the allegation of campaign sabotage is documented only in Davis’s own accounts; and that the full truth of what occurred in the weeks before the ceremony, in the privacy of industry relationships, may never be recoverable.
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WHAT REMAINS: THREE PERFORMANCES AND THE FILMS THAT CONTAINED THEM
Ultimately, what exists that cannot be disputed or qualified or subjected to evidentiary scrutiny is the work itself.
Anne Bancroft’s Annie Sullivan walks into the Keller home in *The Miracle Worker* and finds a child who has lived in darkness—sensory darkness—and who has developed, in that darkness, a ferocity and an intelligence that Sullivan must meet with matching ferocity and superior organization. The film’s account of how Sullivan meets that challenge, and what it costs her, is one of the more complete portraits of a teaching relationship in the history of cinema. It endures because the specific human dynamics it dramatizes—the love that expresses itself as refusal, the discipline that contains compassion, the moment of breakthrough that arrives after what seems like total failure—are recognizable across contexts. Keller’s moment at the pump is still moving, more than sixty years after filming, because the film has made us understand what it took to reach it.