As Hollywood rivalries go, the one between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford was about as vicious as it gets.
The sharp-taloned stars appeared together famously in 1962’s “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” — even though neither could stand the sight of the other.
Though they were washed up by then, the movie was a surprise hit.
Its success led to a reunion in “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte.”
But after just a few days of filming, the hatred on the set was so intense, Crawford quit.
The Crawford-Davis feud is the subject of a new play called “Bette and Joan,” by British writer Malcolm McKay.
Tony Award winner Doug Hughes (“Doubt”) directed a staged reading of the play last week in New York with the perfect cast — Jan Maxwell as Crawford and Christine Ebersole as Davis.
Maxwell, a four-time Tony nominee, lit up Broadway last season in “Lend Me a Tenor.”
Ebersole won a Tony a couple of years ago as “Little Edie” Beale in “Grey Gardens.”
“They were both terrific,” says a source. “They were giving real performances, as opposed to impersonations.”
(We’ll leave those to the drag queens.)
“Bette and Joan” takes place on the set of “Hush . . . Hush.”
Shooting has been suspended because the director, Robert Aldrich, is in Switzerland courting Olivia de Havilland, who would eventually replace Crawford.
Davis and Crawford are left on their own to dredge up all the muck from the past and fling it in each other’s faces.
Michael Thornton, a British reporter who befriended Davis at the end of his life, once suggested that what triggered the enmity was that Crawford, who was bisexual, hit on Davis when they were young and was rebuffed.
In retaliation, Crawford later married Franchot Tone, whom Davis had been in love with for years.
“She took him from me,” Davis once said. “She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness. I have never forgiven her for that and never will.”
But Davis had her revenge.
David Bret, Crawford’s biographer, says Davis spread the word that the ice water Crawford sipped on the set of “Baby Jane” was, in fact, “100 percent vodka.”
When Crawford left “Hush . . . Hush,” Davis told the press she was suffering from a “pathological fear” of growing old.
All of this is hashed out in the play. The dialogue is as bitchy as you’d expect, and Ebersole and Maxwell had fun delivering the zingers, a source says.
McKay’s doing a rewrite to clear up some structural problems, so don’t look for “Bette and Joan” until 2012.
But the play sounds like fun to me, and I can’t wait to see Maxwell and Ebersole claw each other’s eyes out.
THE cast of “The Addams Family,” in costume, trooped out of the Lunt-Fontanne Wednesday night to watch its marquee dim in honor of veteran production stage manager Beverley Randolph, who died this week at 59.
Over the years, Randolph managed such musicals as “Curtains,” “Into the Woods” and “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”
Directors such as Hal Prince and James Lapine valued her ability to keep their long-running shows in mint condition.
Randolph always wore pearls to work, and I’m sure performers up and down Broadway can still hear the clickety-click of those pearls as she climbed the stairs to their dressing rooms after the show to give them notes.