Bette Davis’s Baby Jane Hudson sits at a piano and sings “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” in the opening credits sequence of *What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?*, and everything that follows is implicit in that image: the child-star trauma preserved in grotesque formaldehyde, the adult woman who was never allowed to grow up, the specific American mythology of celebrity and its abandonment. Davis’s performance is the film’s engine and its most disturbing element simultaneously. She makes Jane funny and terrifying and pitiable and genuinely monstrous in ways that do not cancel each other out; the layers remain legible and distinct. It is not, in the end, a performance about Joan Crawford or about their rivalry. It is a performance about what happens to people who are loved too publicly and too early and then not at all.
Joan Crawford’s Blanche Hudson lies in her bed in that same film and endures. The role is reactive by design—she is constrained by her wheelchair and eventually by her bed, dependent on her sister’s pathological care—but Crawford brings to Blanche something that the reactive nature of the role can obscure if you’re not watching carefully. Blanche’s dignity is not passive. She maintains it under sustained assault, and the specific quality of that maintenance—the refusal to collapse entirely into victimhood, the moments of resistance within the constraints of her physical helplessness—is its own kind of performance achievement.
Three women, three pieces of work that have lasted. The night that connected all three of them lasted only a few hours and produced, in real time, an award and an acceptance and a loss. The mythology that grew from those hours has lasted considerably longer. It is worth asking, at regular intervals, whether the mythology serves the work or consumes it.