Forget six degrees of separation. To speak with author Charlotte Chandler is to be one degree away from true movie royalty. Get this: Chandler knew both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and included Ingrid Bergman, Groucho Marx, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Federico Fellini in her circle of intimates—and she's written what she terms 'personal biographies' of all of them. Her latest, Not the Girl Next Door, is about Crawford, and it follows on the heels of her best selling Davis book, The Girl Who Walked Home Alone. ( Pictured: Charlotte Chandler with Bette Davis,left. Photo by Marvin Hamlisch )
Crawford, thanks to the double-edged legacy of Mommie Dearest—with its camp tagline 'No wire hangers' ( which yours truly is hosting a screening of this Mother's Day at the Music Box ) —has reached a new legion of younger fans, while Davis continues to hold her own every time All About Eve shows up on Turner Classic Movies. Both stars, who would have been 100 this year, are featured in new boxed DVD sets ( Chandler is included in new documentary featurettes on many of these ) . And fans young and old unite around What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the only screen teaming of these two classic stars who first defined the word 'diva.' Chandler discussed Crawford, Davis and their enduring legacy ( and feud ) in a wide-ranging chat with Windy City Times.
Windy City Times: You knew both Bette and Joan. There are probably not many people in the world in your unique position.
Charlotte Chandler: That's true, so it's very special, and I feel that it's a responsibility to share it because they put a lot of time and effort into sharing with me and, so, I'm glad to be able to share it with other people. Because they are special.
WCT: People don't remember Norma Shearer anymore; and they don't remember Hedy Lamar or Rita Hayworth. Why Joan and Bette? Because they were strong women?
CC: Yes, they were—the characters they played were. In fact, both of them said it was a problem for them to play such strong characters because audiences thought they were those people and, if you do a good job, you're perceived as being that person. Joan Crawford [ especially ] said it was a great problem but [ it was a problem for ] Bette, too. They said it was especially a problem with men—that men saw them as too strong.
WCT: And were probably intimidated by them.
CC: Yes, very much so—and certainly for Bette Davis, it limited the number of people, she felt, who dared to approach her.
WCT: Was their feud real? Was it publicity?
CC: I think that they didn't care so much for each other. It wasn't a feud, though. Joan Crawford said, 'It takes two to feud,' and she felt no feud at all. She said she never understood why she called Bette 'Bette' and Bette called her 'Miss Crawford.' But Bette told me that when she called her 'Joan' it didn't get a laugh [ and ] it didn't any mention in a newspaper; if she called her 'Miss Crawford'—especially with her sneer—she'd get a line in a column or something.
WCT: They were both smart about publicity, weren't they?
CC: They tried to be. No one ever cared so much about it, in my opinion, as Joan Crawford. She believed that her public had made her a star—not the studio, but her public—and she answered every piece of fan mail she ever got. Bette Davis felt the same way, but she wasn't willing to answer all that fan mail.
WCT: Now did one talk about the other?
CC: Well, they had a lot of respect for each other and, of course, the film that maybe they're both most famous for now with people is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and they're in it together. They both talked a lot about working together on Baby Jane. Actually, Joan Crawford was very grateful to Bette Davis for turning down Mildred Pierce, the role that brought her back and won her the Oscar. It was so important to her.
WCT: Because you knew them both so well, was there anything that they did off the screen that would be surprising to people?
CC: I think people would be surprised to realize how much Joan cared about what people thought of her and about always keeping up the image that she had. She told me that she heard her doorman telling another doorman that Joan Crawford lived in his building with a lot of pride and she said that she was never going to let down that doorman. She dressed up to take out her garbage. [ Laughs ]
WCT: Was Joan funny?
CC: Bette was funnier. Joan Crawford was a very serious person but she had a sense of humor. She appreciated humor, and every once in awhile she had a pretty funny line. But Bette was constantly funny.
WCT: I love the story about Joan having William Haines and his boyfriend over for dinner. They were standing in the backyard and it was chilly and they asked the butler to bring each of them one of Joan's mink coats and she laughed and told the butler to get them. [ Laughs ]
CC: [ Laughs ] Right! I was just watching William Haines on Turner Classic Movies the other night. He was such a great star, and his name was so big over the title when Joan Crawford's name was small and he helped her so much. I think besides Daddy Cassin ( Crawford's stepfather ) , he was the person who helped her most because he helped her learn how to become a star. He was especially conscious of publicity and promotion. He had her hire a publicist when she couldn't really afford it but then he gave the publicist most of the money so that he could do it.
WCT: I didn't know that. Then she, in turn—along with Carole Lombard—hired him to do their homes when he started the decorating business after he was forced to leave Metro because [ he was ] gay.
CC: Yes—and both influenced and persuaded other friends to use him.
WCT: Having known both, did you have a preference?
CC: Well, I knew Bette much longer than I knew Joan so I had a different relation with her. It's very hard to say, with all the people I've written about. They were all really wonderful people.
WCT: I remember when I talked with Virginia Madsen and she said, 'I wish we had more of the protection of the studio system that Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had. You only saw these women on the screen or in very carefully controlled magazine pieces.' You didn't see them going to the store.
CC: The mystery, of course, is so important. Mystery is glamour and it would be a very great thing for someone to be able to achieve that under a microscope. For me, one of the problems is that everybody is limited because there aren't that many films. When an actress could make as many as five films in a year, it meant that if she had some failures they were hardly noticed because she was also having great successes. But if people only get to make one picture every two years—even big stars—they can't be as much a part of people's lives and there's the question of whether coming into the home on television does the same thing. It makes people very famous and part of people's lives but not in the same way. They're not larger than life blown up there on the screen. Certainly actresses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford thought about overexposure. They always tried to maintain a bit of a distance.
WCT: They learned from Garbo.
CC: [ Laughs ] Yes. Garbo learned from Garbo.
WCT: So are you working on another book?
CC: I am. The next book is going to be about Mae West.
WCT: Talk about somebody who built an archetype on the screen that was different than the person off the screen.
CC: That's exactly what I'm writing about. I'm writing about the difference between the Mae West I knew in real life and the one on the screen. Sometimes she was Mae West in real life and sometimes she was partly or wholly the character on screen, and the separation and whether she could easily separate them herself—she couldn't all the time.
WCT: I would guess that to be true—especially when she got further away from what made her so famous and what people probably [ got ] from her.
CC: Well, she hung on to it quite long. I met her in the last year of her life and she was at least 87 and she was Mae West, still. But I could say the same thing about all the great stars I knew. When I met Bette Davis and I went in to see her in the hotel apartment in New York, she was dressed as Bette Davis in a fantastic black dress and sheer black stockings and black pumps and [ was ] made up with eye shadow and eyelashes—false eyelashes were a big thing for both Joan and Bette—to emphasize the big eyes and she looked like Bette Davis in a Warner Bros. movie. Then, when I went to meet Joan Crawford the first time, she had done the same thing. They didn't keep it up forever, but they both thought the first impression was the most important.
