Bette and Joan The Divine Feud Read Online Free PDF

arrive. She takes a sip from every young man's glass, then, hearing the band warm up, clicks her fingers, shakes her head, and breaks into a wild Charleston on the dance floor. Encumbered by her skirt, she whips it off and finishes the dance in her slip. "The scene says as much about egotism and sex in the 1920's as John Travolta's disco turn did in the 1970's," said writer Ethan Mordden.
     
    When
Our Dancing Daughters
opened in December 1927, Crawford's name was billed under the title. After the rave reviews came in, accompanied by the healthy box-office receipts, her name was lifted above the title. The day of the billing change, she was asked to sign a more generous contract with M-G-M. That night, in lieu of attending a formal dinner at the home of Irving and Norma Thalberg, the new star celebrated alone. "I rode around town with a small box camera," she said, "taking pictures of 'Joan Crawford,' blazing on the theater marquees."
     
    Bette—A Serious Actress
    During the time when Joan was firmly placing her black satin dancing shoes on the first rung of stardom in Hollywood, Bette Davis was in the East, still gathering the essentials for the foundation of a serious dramatic career.
     
    Upon graduation from Anderson Dramatic School, she worked for a season at the Cape Playhouse in Massachusetts, then went to Rochester, New York, to work with the George Cukor Repertory Company. Midway through the season she was fired for being aloof with her fellow workers. "I didn't know ingenues were supposed to party as well as work," she said. "She refused dates with the young men," said actor Louis Calhern, who found Bette "uppity and unpopular." "She wasn't supposed to sleep around, but she wasn't supposed to be Saint Teresa of Avila either," said Calhern. Equipped with the Aries trait of never forgetting a grievance, Bette would censure Cukor for years to come. "He had his little circle of admirers," she said, "sycophants, if you will. Miriam [Hopkins] was one, Joan [Crawford] came later. They would surround him and adore him. I have always despised that sort of fawning behavior. I was too strong and too talented for Mr. Cukor to mold, and therefore I was released from the company." Cukor, who described Bette as "a very interesting actress at the outset, almost maniacal," had his version of the events. "She was a stubborn young lady. She liked to disrupt rehearsals by giving her interpretation of the author's thoughts—not only for her character, but for the other roles also. It was useless to argue with her, because during the actual performance she would do what she thought was best, frequently giving a different style of performance from the other actors."
     
    Being fired in Rochester turned out to be provident for Bette. In New York she moved twice as fast to become professionally established. She joined an off-Broadway group on MacDougal Street, the Provincetown Players, and made her debut in
The Earth Between,
the story of a girl incestuously in love with her father. The following day Brooks Atkinson of the New York
Times
deemed her" an enchanting creature," and one month later she was asked to audition for Blanche Yurka. Judging Bette to be "a maddening handful," and her mother "a pain in the neck ... a weak, silly creature," Miss Yurka nonetheless hired the ingenue to tour with her in
The Wild Duck.
As Hedvig, Bette conquered the critics in Philadelphia and Washington, and in her native Boston her real father visited her backstage. Ignoring her performance, he told her, "You would make a very fine secretary."
     
    When the tour with Blanche Yurka ended, Bette played a rebellious daughter in
Broken Dishes
on Broadway. During rehearsals the director found her "impossible ... neurotic ... and emotionally backward." On opening night the critics said she was "mesmerizing," "incandescent," and "made of lightning." A week later she was asked by a talent scout to make a screen test for Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn. When the