In 2002, Playbill announced that Grey Gardens—the Maysles brothers' cultishly adored 1975
documentary on Big and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, American aristocrats (and
cousins of Jackie Onassis) gone feral from desperation and poverty—was
going to be turned into a Broadway musical. The news followed that a 2008 Hollywood
movie was being planned, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange as the
Edies, and Jeanne Tripplehorn as Jackie O. Fans were apoplectic: How dare they
tamper with our beloved Beales? This was clearly the worst thing that ever
happened to anybody in America! What the makers of the new Grey
Gardens don't seem to realize is that they
are dealing with some staunch characters. Us Bealemaniacs are a passionate
bunch when it comes to protecting the dignity and good name of our favorite
crazy cat ladies. I don't like to brag, but I may very well hold the world
record for most viewings of Grey Gardens by a heterosexual male under the age of 50.
Besides, it seems silly to make a
Hollywood version of Grey Gardens when a
fictional take on the Maysles' classic documentary already exists. Heck, it
even predates Grey Gardens by 13 years.
It's called What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and it is the subject of today's entry in Better Late
Than Never. This might seem like a curious candidate for the column. What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane? isn't a
ubiquitous pop-culture staple like Raiders of the Lost Ark, where admitting to not having seen it at, say, a
cocktail party or in the A.V Club conference
room is likely to elicit horrified gasps of "You mean you really haven't seen it? Never? Not even once, while drunk?
OMG! Why not?" (We talk extensively in online abbreviations here at The
A.V. Club, LOL!)
It isn't inconceivable that the
average moviegoer or cinephile hasn't seen What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? It is, however, inconceivable that I somehow managed
to go 32 years without seeing it. Watching Baby Jane? for the first time last month, I had that Better Late
Than Never-friendly feeling of "Where have you been all my life? And why in
God's name have I not seen you until now?"
Essentially a macabre, show-biz
version of Grey Gardens—think the
Beales gone Psycho—Baby Jane belongs
to pretty much all my favorite subgenres. It's a black-and-white shocker, a
crazed psycho-melodrama, a pitch-black show-biz satire, a warped meditation on
the traumatizing effects of child stardom, and a gothic tale of familial
dysfunction as its dysfunctioniest. Furthermore, it's a film that derives a
subversive, kinky kick from the way the onscreen action mirrors and distorts
the backstage melodrama.
Baby Jane had the chutzpah to cast Joan Crawford and Bette
Davis, two has-been movie stars who famously despised each other, as has-been
movie star sisters locked in a poisonous, co-dependent cycle of neediness and
contempt. In a famous bit of Hollywood lore, Davis ordered a Coca-Cola vending
machine for the cast and crew solely to antagonize her bitter onscreen and offscreen
rival, whose husband was a Pepsi executive.
Robert Aldrich's film opens with
Davis' creepily adorable younger self (Julie Allred) at the height of her
prepubescent super-stardom. In front of a packed, adoring crowd and concession
stands selling "Baby Jane" dolls that will become a ghoulish motif later in the
film, Allred sings a nauseatingly maudlin, Freudian ballad/love song to her
dead father ("I've written a letter to daddy / his address is heaven above")
that takes the creepy sexualization of child stars to macabre extremes.
She's a proto-JonBenet Ramsey,
and the living-doll embodiment of Graham Greene's famous comment about the
furtive erotic allure of Shirley Temple: "Her
admirers—middle-aged men and clergymen—respond to her dubious
coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed
with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue
drops between their intelligence and their desire."
Allred
has dubious coquetry up the wazoo. The grasping, rapacious greed of Allred's
father and the fact that Allred is singing a mawkish, sentimental love song
with incestuous and necrophiliac undertones only heightens the ghoulishness.
Offstage, Allred's pint-size diva bears little resemblance to the perfect
little moppet she plays onstage. She's a screamer and a bully who runs
roughshod all over her long-suffering sister and mother. In a scene heavy with
foreshadowing, Allred's mother explains to the girl who will grow up to be Joan
Crawford (poor dear) that it is her solemn duty to gracefully and selflessly
serve her sister, no matter how deplorably Allred treats her.
The
film then leaps forward in time to a screening room where a studio executive is
watching an adult Davis phone in another dreadful performance. She's an ingénue
with no future, a terrible reputation, a Texas-sized drinking problem, and a
studio that merely humors her out of deference to Crawford, an up-and-comer
whose career has skyrocketed while Davis' tumbled.
In a
wickedly subversive metatextual twist, the footage of Davis sucking onscreen is
taken from two actual Davis movies: the unforgettably titled Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper. According to Hollywood legend, the filmmakers asked Davis
if there were any particularly awful performances from her starlet years she
thought would fit those scenes, and she told them they could have their pick;
she thought she sucked in pretty much all her early films. She was a hell of a
sassy, smart-mouthed broad, that Bette Davis. I mean that in the nicest
possible way. That almost perverse lack of vanity informs every aspect of the
film. In Baby Jane, Davis looks like
shit and behaves monstrously. Of course, her character also gets to kick the
shit out of Joan Crawford, so the part did have its rewards.
We
then flash forward in time yet again to the anxious present. Davis has devolved
into a grotesque caricature of her child-star self, a mean old drunk who
dresses like a cute little girl. Davis keeps Crawford a veritable prisoner in a Grey Gardens-like mansion, heaping
scorn and abuse on her more talented, successful sister while nevertheless
living off her dwindling fortune.
Crawford
here plays yet another saintly woman who suffers terrible indignities with
grace and tolerance. Confined to a wheelchair for years following a boozy,
half-remembered car accident that figures prominently in the film's overheated
climax, Crawford bears the brunt of her sister's bottomless rage against a
world that has forgotten her, or worse, remembers her only as a real movie
star's drunken, crazy sister.
I
have a theory that the very famous tend to stop developing emotionally and intellectually
at the age of their greatest personal and professional success. Their skin grows
wrinkled and their bodies decay, but their maturation remains hopelessly
stunted. For Little Edie Beale, a heartbreakingly gorgeous, vivacious debutante
who never became anything more, that means remaining a bratty, self-involved
teen well into old age. For Davis' Baby Jane, that means forever remaining an
obnoxious, self-absorbed prepubescent. Somewhere along the way, something went
horribly wrong for both Little Edie and Baby Jane. They seem desperate to will
the nightmarish present into the dewy, idealized past through sheer mental exertion.
They're forever shadowboxing a past they can't change or undo.
Back
to Baby Jane. In a desperate bid to
resurrect her career, Davis hires a smug, narcissistic piano player (Victor Buono,
in a debut role that won him an Oscar nomination), who feeds into her poisonous
self-delusion.
Like
Davis, Buono lingers under the useful fiction that the world owes him
everything, and is unforgivably late in delivering on its promise. Buono lives
at home with his mother, whom he treats with condescension and cruelty. He's
fat and unsuccessful but impeccably dressed, and he carries himself with a
regal disdain for the considerations of the working world. In his mind, he's an
artist, and a great one at that. His lofty sense of self becomes a protective
shield against the degradations of a callous world. Davis and Buono are a match
made in hell, deluded dreamers rotting away from the inside.
When
Crawford conspires to leave her personal hell by secretly selling a dream house
that has become a prison, Davis takes drastic action to keep her meal ticket
from abandoning her, or worse, having her institutionalized. After killing
their African-American maid, Davis takes Crawford along on a flight from Johnny
Law, and their fraught, complicated relationship enters a grim endgame. Baby
Jane ends with a melodramatic twist I
will not give away, but that helps explain why Crawford would continue to put
herself at the mercy of a woman who wishes her nothing but harm.
Director
Robert Aldrich had a curiously bifurcated career. He directed the manliest of
men's movies, Neanderthal classics of über-machismo like Kiss Me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Yard. But he was also an accomplished director of movies about
women like Baby Jane, its unofficial
follow-up Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and The Killing Of Sister George. That's actually not as much of a contradiction as it
might seem. Aldrich made the opposite of chick flicks. The women, or rather
tough dames, in his movies were more likely to exchange fisticuffs or barbed
insults than recipes or gossip. The films he made for men and women (or, in the
case of Baby Jane, men who dress up
like women for fun and profit) were tough, darkly comic, uncompromising, and
bracingly unsentimental. Baby Jane is
no exception. It excels as both a warped psychodrama and pitch-black comedy. It's
exhilarating seeing just how dark Aldrich and Davis are willing to go.
Whatever
Happened To Baby Jane quickly developed
a reputation as a cult and camp classic. Hungry for additional info on Baby
Jane, I was disappointed to find that
the audio commentary on the DVD comes from two men famous for pretending to be
women, drag queen Lipsynka and Die, Mommie, Die! writer/star Charles Busch. It seemed like an implicit
concession that Baby Jane was little
more than a widely mocked and frequently parodied camp curio. I think it's much
more than that. Like Psycho, it's
paradoxically classy, artful trash, or a trashy art movie. There's something
weirdly subversive about watching artists as towering and brilliant as Alfred
Hitchcock or Bette Davis sink their fangs into such lurid, pulpy material. To
me, Baby Jane isn't a camp classic or
a cult classic so much as it's a straight-up classic.