The ‘Feud’ between Hollywood icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford fuels FX series
Bette Davis. Joan Crawford. Two iconic actresses … one legendary feud.
Having worked his creative magic for FX on such series as “American Horror Story” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” producer Ryan Murphy turns his attention — with ample assistance from modern, Oscar-winning acting staples Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange — to a famous Hollywood rivalry in “Feud: Bette and Joan,” premiering today.
The saga largely revolves around Crawford (Lange) and Davis’ (Sarandon) work in the classic 1962 thriller “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” a major vehicle for both of them when their decades-spanning stardom was on the wane. The result was competition and mistrust between them that escalated to an epic level, thus ensuring the sort of drama that qualifies for a limited-run (eight-episode) television series.
“I wasn’t really interested in doing anything that was ‘campy’ or a ‘camp fest,’ ” Murphy maintains. “I was interested in something a little deeper and a little bit more emotional and painful. I think ultimately what happened to both women is very painful.
“I got to know Bette Davis. I had a very minor relationship with her and got to spend time with her, and … you go into something like that expecting a larger-than-life camp figure, which I think she helped propagate. And she told me when I talked to her that she felt that she was never going to be anybody unless somebody could impersonate her, so in the public view, she rarely turned that off. She felt that was important for her survival, but when I got across from her one-on-one and I got to spend four hours talking with her one day, she was not that person at all. She was not camp. She was not broad. She was very emotional and real, and all of those things were in the water when we began to write the show.”
Sarandon says she found “the good news and bad news with playing someone well-known is that there are so many pieces of film and TV appearances and interviews and recordings and everything, so we just hunkered down. For the first six weeks, we were just getting as much as we could — but when Ryan first talked to me about it, I said, ‘I’m just terrified. I am so scared.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m scared, too. It will be OK.’ And that really helped me a lot.”
Much Crawford material also was available to Lange, who reasons, “When (Crawford) was in public, she was performing, so it was very hard to find a moment where you could like really discern what the heart and soul of that character was. As an actor, you go back to, ‘OK, well, this is what happened to her in her childhood, what determined who she was: the physical abuse, sexual abuse, the poverty, all these things she was constantly fighting against for the rest of her life.
“She had a 5th-grade education,” adds Lange. “As she said, ‘Everything I learned, I was taught by MGM’: how to walk, how to speak, how to present your face. I mean, everything, so there is this great artifice. Then, what becomes interesting as an actor is when that artifice falls away, and then you actually can invent what you would imagine was inside her.”
Additional notables in the “Feud” cast include Alfred Molina as Baby Jane director Robert Aldrich, Stanley Tucci as film-industry mogul Jack Warner (whose Warner Bros. studio made that movie), Judy Davis as then-powerful gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Olivia de Havilland (Davis’ co-star in Aldrich’s “Baby Jane”-ish follow-up “Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte”), Kiernan Shipka (“Mad Men”) as Davis’ daughter, and two more veterans (besides Lange) of Murphy’s company of ensemble players: Emmy winners Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates, respectively portraying actresses Geraldine Page and Joan Blondell.