Belated Birthday Wishes to the Original Baby Jane Hudson.

'At 50, I thought proudly, 'Here we are, half century!' Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black afro wig, wore black clothes, and hung a black wreath on my door.'

Bette Davis would have been 104 last week. Here is a picture of her from a Life Magazine photo shoot taken in 1939. In a rickshaw.

'From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.'

My two favourite performances of hers (without having seen Wicked Stepmother) are from two films in the latter stages of her career, in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Robert Aldrich, 1962), when her ingenue phase is left behind and the saltiness and bitterness of her lived experiences and career lends autobiographical frisson to her screen presence.


'Until you're known in my profession as a monster, you're not a star.'

Her rivalry with Joan Crawford that culminated on the set of the latter is Hollywood legend, inspiring some amazing one-liners and one-upmanship in the form of on-set pranks, and is a constant source of fascination and schadenfreude for me. Bette & Joan The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine chronicles it in depth quite deliciously and is well worth a read. Here are some great quotes during the feud from Ruth Elizabeth Davis (1908 - 1989).

'I see - she's the original good time that was had by all.'

'Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Joan Crawford always plays ladies.'

 'I wouldn't piss on Joan Crawford if she were on fire.'

This is slightly unrelated but I am absolutely dying to see the TV movie remake of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? starring Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. It's updated to the early 1990's and looks incredible based on these clips available on YouTube... 

Monty

Montgomery Clift was a fascinatingly tortured film star, and one of the most beautiful, whose legacy for me resides in two things secondary to his screen talent: his magnificent eyebrows and his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor ('Bessie Mae' as he called her). She saved his life once by digging his teeth from his throat after an automobile accident (which you can read about here).

Today's celebrity gossip is so uninspiring in comparison.