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When compared objectively, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford boast impressive careers — Joan’s just shy of half a century, and Bette’s bordering on nearly sixty years. Both women quite literally grew up in front of a camera — in Joan’s case, having gotten her start as a teenager — and Bette’s, being the daughter of a professional photographer by trade. Joan was signed to MGM at nineteen, Bette to Universal when she was twenty-two. When Joan completed work on her last film, Trog, she was sixty four-years-old. Bette, conversely, was eighty-one when she was forced to quit work on Wicked Stepmother due to her rapidly ailing health. Both films were critically received, and remain to this day staples in camp canon. They both marked the final nail in the coffin for two very venerable and prodigious film careers — one by choice, and the other by fate. This detail in itself will be one which I further deconstruct, as it marks a critical divide between the two women and their respective personalities.
I’ll start by approaching Trog, which was released in 1970. This picture was a low budget English production, the last of many out-sourced films Joan would make. Her accommodations were a far cry from that which a star of her stature was used to. Unfortunately, as an aging woman in this period, she had two options: retire or persevere through unflattering psychobiddy roles, a category she’d ironically helped to immortalize years earlier thanks to her performance in Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Many other greats of the Golden Age opted for the former, preferring to fade into obscurity than struggle and suffer through unflattering and inconsequential parts. Tenacious as she was, Crawford was to befall the same fate. Her acute self-criticism — the very thing that initially gave rise to a very successful and disciplined career — would ultimately unravel it all. Trog was the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back. Nearly a decade of unsatisfactory films, coupled with the rise of the brazen and bold New Hollywood closed the curtains on Crawford’s career.
Crawford as Dr. Brockton in Trog, her final film role
In Trog, Crawford plays Dr. Brockton, a researcher hell bent on proving that troglodytes, elusive prehistoric creatures, are capable of being trained and domesticated. On one of her many expeditions in search of this creature, she finally discovers a stray one. While Trog is far from a masterpiece, it manages to maintain a somewhat serious tone for the majority of the film. It has its campy moments (most all, unfortunately, involving Joan), but manages to still coherently tell a story — albeit a poor one — from start to finish with relative ease. It certainly isn’t one’s ideal vision of a swan song, but next to Davis’ it scintillates like a rapturous work of art.
Joan in one of her final performances: a guest appearance on the show The Sixth Sense. The episode in question was titled “Dear Joan: We’re Going to Scare You to Death!” and was filmed in 1972.
Though Trog itself wasn’t quite enough to push Crawford into total retirement, it certainly made a strong enough impression as to deter her from further seeking out roles in feature films. She went on to star in a few more TV specials, her last notable one being an episode on The Sixth Sense in 1972. Two years later, photos from a public appearance at the Rainbow Room in New York would seal her fate forever, causing her to shut herself in reclusion for the last three years of her life until she died in 1977.
Joan as she appeared at the Rainbow Room on that fateful evening in 1974 — she would never be publicly photographed again.
To act is to escape from reality, and Joan took that to an even greater extreme than most, having quite literally invented her star persona. Her life was a multi-layered meta performance — even off screen, in her most natural and candid moments, she was still actively embodying a role. In order for her career to function, the persona had to. And when age and reality began to set in for Joan Crawford the star, she ultimately became unable to continue her career. Tragically poetic, it brought her full circle: just as she had been as a young girl, she was terribly lonely and miserable in her final years of life. She couldn’t use acting as a means of escape any longer because her safe space had been compromised — that is, the act that was Joan Crawford.
Joan, I believe, thought a foray into a new and rising genre — science fiction — might provide a new window of career opportunity. Unfortunately, she was cast in a stinker of a vehicle. Contemporary sci-fi films of the era like Planet of the Apes (‘68) marvelled crowds and birthed cult followings, but unfortunately Trog was no such film. Instead, it panned out to be such a box office failure that years later Joan reflected, “had I seen that billboard, …. I would have committed suicide.”
Davis similarly embraced new frontiers, but unlike her contemporary was not deterred by bad reception. It’s an interesting parallel to examine, and one that speaks volumes about their characters. Davis was pugnacious and obstinate to a fault, determined to prove anyone and anything wrong for the sake of her own righteousness. Joan, while equally driven, was far more self-conscious. Her reflection of herself — her career — was something she meticulously groomed and maintained, particularly as she ventured into older age. She ultimately cared more about protecting and preserving her persona — the woman she’d created to escape her Dickensian youth — than fighting tooth and nail to remain active and relevant in a heavily changing industry.
True to her spirit, Bette Davis continued to work until she was no longer able. Whereas Joan was faced with her unique dilemma brought about by the convergence of aging and preservation of an image, Bette continued to intrepidly brace any and every role flung her way with great fervor — a strength that had originally helped to catapult her to success. From the start, she’d never cared about her public image, disavowing glamour from the get go. She was earthy, blunt, and unapologetically herself. Thus, acting for her was a full means of escape, an invitation to put her chops to the test that never failed to titillate. She could care less about what it did to her image, and it served her well — until it didn’t. Like Joan, her own nature would eventually be her downfall, which is where Wicked Stepmother comes into play.
The 1980s proved to be a tumultuous decade for Bette. Though she had a strong start, her momentum was quickly stunted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of a stroke. She was immediately hospitalized in dire condition, barely capable of any movement and extremely fatigued. Miraculously — yet not surprisingly, given her steely resolve — she made nearly a complete recovery. Davis was fortunate to have never suffered any loss to her mental faculties, but through tedious rehabilitation was able to restore movement to many a limb doctors had thought lost to paralysis. In the end, it was really only in the left side of her face that she suffered any lasting damage. In the midst of this chaotic ordeal, her only biological daughter published a tell-all novella a la Mommie Dearest, condemning Davis as a cruel and dominating mother who dabbled in witchcraft. Fortunately for Davis, she was able to refute such claims — in her second autobiography This N’ That, she included a postscript personally denouncing BD, which in a sense allowed her the last word, as BD never took the issue any further.
Kathryn Sermak, Bette’s personal assistant from ‘79 until her death observed that [Bette] “was truly never the same since BD’s book,” and her words hold great merit. One needs to look no further than Bette’s filmography — and life — after her recovery from the untimely stroke. From the years of 1985 to 1989 respectively, Bette was markedly more frail and accepted roles of lesser and lesser caliber — the exception being 1987’s Whales of August, in which she played alongside veterans Lillian Gish, Ann Sothern, and Vincent Price. Otherwise, she was relegated to depressingly unremarkable roles, none of which garnered her any significant attention as they were primarily crafted for made for TV movies. Wicked Stepmother finally came along in 1989, and one has to wonder what sort of a state Bette was in to accept a role so preposterous. From anyone’s perspective — cineaste or not — the thought of a two time oscar winning legendary actress starring in a cheap and cringeworthy B picture horror was — and still is — unfathomable.
Davis as she appeared in Wicked Stepmother — ill, frail, and a mere shadow of her once intimidating self.
Bette’s role is that of a matronly vamp — two words that already inherently contradict themselves. Her character is supposed to be older, yes, but also alluring and seductive, recalling Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate. The illusion never even had a chance — as soon as she makes her grand debut on screen, it’s painfully visible that Davis is in frail form. She’s skeletal, barely able to comport herself physically as she struggles to portray any movement whatsoever on the screen. It is a far cry from her days as Leslie from The Letter, or even 1971’s titular Bunny O’Hare, who is filmed running laps in order to get in shape so that she can effectively rob banks. Instead, ‘Miranda,’ as she’s introduced to the viewer, hobbles pitifully around the house. Her shots are purposefully short, so as not to exploit the frail Davis to excess.
Davis with Lionel Stander in Wicked Stepmother
The story unfolding behind the scenes was even more harrowing. After a few months of filming, Davis was forced to bow out due to her rapidly failing health. She would pass away that same year, horribly enervated and emaciated. Director Larry Cohen even documented it in a reflective essay entitled “I Killed Bette Davis,” which details the tragic realities that Davis faced on set during her last few days. The end result, as implied by the piece’s gruesomely blunt title, resulted in the forced resignation of an ailing Davis and an abrupt and unexpected doctoring of the already doomed film. The plot was doctored and Davis’ character ultimately took the physical essence of a cat. Cohen decided that he wanted to keep all footage of Davis in the film, and thus worked around what little footage he had at his disposal. The result, as expected, was a colossal disaster.
While Davis had observed and grown with the varied evolutions of cinema in her career, there reached a point where even she could not keep up. Time, in essence, always wins out in the end. Movies were being centered less around the star, and with technology on the rise came a shift in genre and production that favored these new tools. Gone were the days of classic melodrama. Creating an acclaimed movie in the 1980s was not much different than it is today, and by all accounts Wicked Stepmother never had any such potential to begin with. It was almost as if she were set up to purposefully fail, with all these odds stacked against her.
What remains true above all, however, is that both women possessed the uniquely potent combination of innate passion and assiduous drive. Not only did this lend itself to the longevity of their careers, but also the many bumps they weathered along the way which, for many others, would have marked an insurmountable impasse. Though these two works are ones that are often purposefully overlooked (and understandably so), they still hold vestiges of that special star quality. While the context and conversation around these films may be macabre and upsetting, they nevertheless highlight the exquisite professionalism and dedication that these two women maintained throughout the entirety of their lives. Aging and mortality are an inevitable part of the human experience that link us all, one of the few tethers we have to the seemingly intangible and immortal. Just as their earlier films do, Davis’ and Crawford’s final contributions to cinema present a distinctive lens into which one can discern and examine the complexity of their constitutions.
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