Fact-Checking Feud: Inside Joan Crawford’s Sad Final Years

Even before FX’s Feud premiered, series creator Ryan Murphy teased how the mini-series would end for Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the beleaguered Hollywood legends played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon.

“I have always had a wistful dream that Bette and Joan could have watched this [show] together,” Murphy told Vanity Fair of the star-crossed friends. “I think that my favorite line from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is at the end of the film, when Jane tells Blanche, just as she is dying, ‘You mean all this time, we could have been friends?’ To me, that’s what the whole show is about.”

Murphy was so serious about the sentiment that he used it for the title of his finale: “You Mean All This Time We Could Have Been Friends?” And, as he hinted he might, Murphy found a way to reimagine a better outcome for his protagonists. Crawford, nearing the end of her days in her high-rise Manhattan apartment, hallucinates a brilliant fantasy sequence in which she walks into her living room to find Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci), Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis), and Davis. Warner and Hopper—the forces who willed the stars’ great rivalry into existence, for good publicity and better copy—part, and Crawford sits alone with Davis.

It’s tender, cathartic, and tragic to see these two Hollywood titans put their vulnerability and ego aside to connect. The sad irony of the fantasy, though, is that in the loneliness of these women’s final years, they never realized how much they truly had in common. They were strong women who battled the studio system to build long-lasting careers, only to be tossed aside as talk-show punchlines the moment the industry decided their expiration date was up. They focused so intently on their careers that they never had truly satisfying relationships with family or friends, and would go on to become the subjects of vengeful memoirs from their ungrateful daughters. And they would cope with the despair of their dwindling careers—and in turn, their crumbling identities—in the same way: by becoming alcoholic recluses fixated on the past.

In the finale, Murphy allows for another fantasy for the duo by showing Davis dialing Crawford’s number after hearing that her What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? co-star is sick. But Davis cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver—one final missed opportunity at what could have been a meaningful friendship. In a real-life interview, though, Davis’s daughter, B.D., explained why she thought her mother never thawed her iciness toward Crawford.

“Mother felt they had nothing in common,” B.D. said, according to Shaun Considine’s The Divine Feud. “And at that time she couldn’t be friends with herself. She was full of self-pity and hatred.”

Without a lifeline from Davis or anyone else in Hollywood, Crawford’s final years were actually even sadder than they are as depicted on Murphy’s Feud finale.

The Oscar-winning actress closed out her acting career in 1970 with the sci-fi abomination Trog. In 1973, Pepsi forced Crawford into retirement as the company’s spokeswoman—a news flash the actress said she learned by reading the financial pages of The New York Times. The severed relationship meant that the actress no longer received her “forty-thousand-dollar expenses, her car, her New York secretary, and the use of the company jet,” according to The Divine Feud. To compensate, the actress moved to a smaller apartment in her building and streamlined her once grand lifestyle.

The final blow to Crawford’s ego came the following year—as shown on Feud—when she was photographed unflatteringly outside a book party she co-hosted for John Springer. Crawford was so “horrified” by the photos published in the newspaper the next day that she told biographer Charlotte Chandler she imposed her own exile. Per Not the Girl Next Door: