Hollywood's Second Sex by Aubrey Malone

Author:Aubrey Malone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2015-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Life After Marilyn

“It was tough for women to last in films,” wrote Jeanine Basinger. “Those who ran the studios and operated the star machine knew only too well that the beautiful female stars they were manufacturing were going to lose popularity sooner than the males. If a female star could last for a decade she really paid off. If she could last for two decades she was a phenomenon. If she lasted longer than that she was a miracle.”1

Such a woman was Bette Davis, who cheated time—and studio tyranny—by reinventing herself. Around the time of Monroe’s death, the consensus in the film industry was that Davis was a busted flush. Her recent films hadn’t done much business and her forthcoming, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? seemed like a desperate leap into gothic excess.

Hollywood had various ways of dealing with aging actresses, as we’ve seen. It either put them out on grass, gave them minor parts as mothers and grandmothers, or aunts, or “friends” of the lead. But with Davis, and her Baby Jane co-star Joan Crawford, we witnessed a new phenomenon: The transformation of an aging woman into a monster.

Davis was happy to do whatever it took to make the film a success. She was less vain than Crawford and more willing to reinvent herself if such a transmogrification would revive her career. She’d been a chameleon all her life anyway. In this sense she had less to lose than Crawford with Baby Jane, Crawford having molded her image primarily on glamour. “Bette’s best chaperone is her face,” Crawford had rasped once had rasped once—unfairly, because at her best Davis was a very attractive woman whereas much of Crawford’s allure came from a bottle or a makeup man. But the makeup men on Baby Jane were going to be her avowed enemies.

Davis was never vain. “I have eyes like a bullfrog,” she confessed, “a neck like an ostrich and limp hair. You just have to be good to survive with that equipment.”2 Especially in an industry dominated by appearance. “Hollywood always wanted me to be pretty,” she said, “but I fought for realism.”3

Baby Jane had a kind of decayed charm, Davis chewing the scenery while Crawford metamorphosed herself from the camp bitch-goddess of the fifties into a decidedly more scary one. But she couldn’t match Davis, which served as a reminder that she’d always lagged behind her in versatility. This was apparent like never before now that they were sharing the screen; there was nowhere to hide. Davis emerged with the Oscar nomination, not Crawford.

Director Robert Aldrich had a tough time raising the budget for Baby Jane. The financiers went, “Those two old bags? Recast this film and we’ll give you any amount of money you want.”4 He refused to do this, which meant he had to shoot it on a shoestring. It was made in three weeks.

Because Davis got so little up front, she made a fortune out of the residuals when it became a box office smash.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.