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Mean on Screen: Gloria Swanson, queen of the silent screen, cultivated an image as a vamp/goddess. She later made a comeback in a Billy Wilder talkie, staring in a typecast role as an aging silent film star.
Photograph courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright
Remember When
Hollywood's Baddest Girls
Ruthless women who we loved to hate
By Cookie Curci-Wright
We admired them, we hated them and, at times, we even envied them--those beautiful but dangerous film divas from the 1940s and 1950s. They got away with things on screen few of us would dare try in real life.
Hollywood's golden era gave us a bounty of sinister grande dames, femmes fatales of movieland whose on screen characters typified treachery and greed. The way they looked, the way they reacted and delivered their lines; live in our memories long after the name of the movie has faded. Like the famous party scene in All About Eve, when an agitated Margo Channing (Bette Davis) raises a well-plucked eyebrow and delivers this ominous, oft-quoted warning line to her guests: "Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy night."
In this film, Davis portrays an aging, egotistical superstar. She was pitted against Ann Baxter who played an ambitious, ruthless, young starlet who stopped at nothing to achieve her goals: art imitating life, perhaps?
Bette Davis once said, "Evil people ... you never forget them and that's the aim of every good actress, never to be forgotten."
I guess that's why she portrayed nasty women in so many of her films: Jezebel (1938), Little Foxes ( 1941), All About Eve (1951) and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) among them.
Davis was at her meanest in Little Foxes. She reached new highs--or in this case, lows--in cruelty, even for her, when she withholds her dying husband's medicine and watches coldly as he gasps his last breath, begging her for help.
Decades later, Davis does it again in the hit film, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? This time, Joan Crawford played her unwitting victim. But when it came to portraying controlling, possessive, willful women, few could hold a candle to Joan Crawford. She was one of a kind with her imposing, bushy, dark eyebrows and intimidating padded shoulder. Some of her tours-de-force roles included Queen Bee, Harriet Crieg and Mildred Pierce, for which she won a best actress Oscar in 1949.
According to the unflattering book, Mommie Dearest, (1977) written by Crawford's adopted daughter Christina, the actress' life strangely paralleled her movie roles. Ten years later Bette Davis' daughter, Beedee, wrote an equally uncomplimentary book about her actress mother. Her book, My Mother's Keeper, caused a bitter estrangement between mother and daughter.
What inspired these movie queens, or what they were really like, as a woman, a wife and mother, we will never know, but I do know that they gave their fans unforgettable films. And in any case, I suspect few of Hollywood's Oscar-winning stars could also win the mother-of-the-year award.
Vanity, thy name is actress. This story is told of Joan Crawford: one day at the height of her career, after lunching at the posh 21 Club, the famous star decided to take advantage of the sunny day and walk home.
"But Madame," her chauffeur protested, "You'll be mobbed."
"I should certainly hope so!" Crawford replied.
When Bette Davis was asked how she liked working on Baby Jane with longtime foe Joan Crawford, she replied: "It was the best time I ever had with Joan; I loved every minute of it--especially when I kicked her down the stairs!"
During the filming of Baby Jane, Crawford and Davis were reportedly referred to as "Bitchy" and "Witchy" by their co-workers. But love them or hate them, their names are synonymous with great films.
In the 1920s, they called it "vamping," and silent movie legend Gloria Swanson could vamp with the best of them. But when the talkies came along , as with so many of her peers, her star faded into oblivion. Swanson made a spectacular comeback, in true Hollywood fashion, when she starred as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard. In the film she portrayed an aging, forgotten star of the silent screen who yearns for a film comeback.
Actress Barbara Stanwyck carved a place for herself in Hollywood's lineup of dangerous femmes. She portrayed strong-willed independent women during her career in films like Stella Dallas (1937), Martha Ivers (1946) and Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) Stanwyck surpassed all her previous films for downright treachery as the deadly blonde in the 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity.
The following year, Lana Turner, the popular young sweater girl of the 1930s, starred in the spellbinder The Postman Always Rings Twice (1942), a story about a beautiful blonde who murders her husband for his insurance money.
For over 40 years, these strong, forceful actresses ruled Hollywood.
I miss those enthralling film stars, whose movie careers spanned from the 1930s to the 1960s. And I miss the days when I sat in rapt attention at the local Bijou Theater, munching on popcorn, gripped by a strong movie plot, and watching my favorite star do her stuff. It was a good time to be a young movie fan, a time when an actress could convey steamy on-screen passion with a little cigarette smoke and a knowing glance.
There was no television for my generation of kids to watch, no videos, or pay-per-view. It's easy to understood why the 40-foot-tall screen sirens--bigger-than-life women without rules--made such an indelible mark on our lives, and why the memories of their work stay with us through the years, rekindling some of our favorite make-believe moments.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
