by Rebecca Keegan |
Joan Crawford, left, and Bette Davis appear in a scene from "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" in 1962. (Associated Press)
In 1962, powerful Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper held a strange and intimate dinner party, hosting rival movie stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis for a truce meal at her home on Tropical Avenue in Beverly Hills, an elegant brick colonial Hopper winkingly called "the house that fear built."
"Will it be disappointing if we get along well?" Davis asked at the start of the dinner, acknowledging the pleasure Hopper's readers undoubtedly took in a catfight between aging divas.
Hopper, whose syndicated column appeared in the L.A. Times, had convened the actresses just before they began production on "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?," a now-iconic film with a mixed legacy. Director Robert Aldrich's psychological thriller about an actress who holds her crippled sister captive in an old mansion united Hollywood's warring grande dames for the first time on screen and yielded five Oscar nominations, but it also minted a particular strain of camp that degrades older women, a kind of hagsploitation film.
"What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and the chilly relationship between its stars will be the subject of the first season of "Feud," a juicy-sounding new FX series from creator Ryan Murphy ("The People v. O.J. Simpson"). With that groundbreaking series, FX and Murphy proved that a well-trod, decades-old L.A. story could feel provocative and current, sparking nuanced conversations about race and gender while delivering breezier pleasures like bad wigs, '90s decor and Kardashian references.
"Feud," which will star Susan Sarandon as Davis and Jessica Lange as Crawford during what Hopper politely called the "Indian summer" of their remarkable careers, has the potential to start another timely conversation - on the topic of older women in Hollywood. At this stage in their lives, the actresses, who by all accounts genuinely despised each other, were bumping against the ageism of their industry.
Contemporary research suggests that's a problem that hasn't gone away and may even have worsened since Davis and Crawford dined at Hopper's table.
In 1962, two women over 50 were still able to topline a major studio film, something which isn't happening today. According to a 2015 USC study, not one of 2014's 100 highest-grossing films featured women over 45 in a leading role. Between 2007 and 2014, women made up less than a quarter of film characters between ages 40 and 64.
"Older females are an endangered species," said Stacy Smith, director of the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at USC's Annenberg School. "Viewers were more likely to see talking animals or anthropomorphized objects than a woman over 45 in a leading role."
Television has been somewhat more hospitable, with streaming networks the most likely companies to cast women over 40, giving them 33% of roles thanks to shows like Netflix's "Grace and Frankie" and Amazon's "Transparent."
Crawford and Davis were glamorous screen creatures of an earlier era, when studio executives believed the tastes of women drove the box office and cast actresses in rich, complex roles, such as Crawford's independent single mother in "Mildred Pierce" and Davis' vulnerable aging career woman in "All About Eve." By the time they made "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?," however, Crawford was 57, Davis was 54, and their power was waning.