I spent sometime today trying to find out just what killed Alfred E. Steele, the CEO of PepsiCo and husband to melodrama actress Joan Crawford. On the Larry King Show a few years ago, her first adopted daughter, Christina Crawford, intimated that her mother, Joan Crawford may have knocked Steele down a flight of steps, killing him. "That was another suspicious thing," Christina said. King asked how he died. "He fell down a flight of stairs," Christina answered. And the worldwide audience got an image of Joan Crawford, with the heavy eyebrows, plummeting her husband, Alfred Steele, down a flight of stairs.
Every article I went to today said he died of a heart attack. One said he died in his sleep. But I couldn't find, at this time, an article that described his cause of death as falling down a flight of stairs. It was not an exhaustive search. There are many places to read about Joan Crawford. Is it possible he fell down stairs, thought he was all right, then died in his sleep that night of a heart attack?
I found the next article fascinating.
The Daily Mail interviewed Bette Davis after she suffered a stroke and lost a breast to cancer. Yet she was still going strong. Her daughter, BD Hyman had written a book about her a la Christina Crawford. She said on stage one night, "Now you'll see how mean I am...The love of my life hurt me the most."
Her daughter had said, "She'll outlive us all." When Bette died a reporter asked how she would remember her mother, "As a great, dramatic actress." Somehow Hyman mixed up religion with embarrassing her mother. She'd found Jesus. Now she says she would not have written the book, but would have merely prayed for Bette. "You can't change anybody," she said on her bible-thumping show. "Only God can." (I hate the self-righteous.) Here is the article from the British newspaper.
The bitter sexual jealousy that made Bette Davis wage war on Joan Crawford
By MICHAEL THORNTON
Last updated at 00:02 15 May 2008
The ramshackle Hollywood mansion was occupied by two ageing sisters.
One of them, a cripple, lay slumped on the floor, helpless; while the other, a grotesquely made-up gargoyle with long blonde ringlets, stood over her, viciously kicking her from head to foot.
It was a scene from one of the most celebrated movies ever made, the 1962 classic What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
But the violence was mirrored by reality.
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Bitter rivals: Joan Crawford, left, and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
For the two protagonists were played by the most bitter of enemies ? Hollywood's rival queen bees, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who had detested each other for 30 years and would do so to their graves.
Davis, the attacker in the movie, was supposed only to simulate violence.
But as she raised and swung her right foot, encased in a black anklestrapped shoe, she made contact with Crawford's head, gashing her scalp, which needed three stitches, and causing a lump the size of an egg.
It was the climax of Hollywood's most deadly feud.
The enmity had festered for decades, despite repeated public denials by both women that it existed.
Davis maintained this fiction even two years after Crawford's death.
Asked in 1979 by a reporter about the enemies she had made in the motion picture business,
Davis replied: "Enemies? I have no enemies. Who?"
"Joan Crawford?" ventured the journalist.
In a tone of "sugared innocence", Davis insisted: "Miss Crawford and I weren't enemies.
"We made one film together. We didn't know each other at all."
The reporter wasn't buying this.
"Most of her rivals are now dead," she observed, "and Miss Davis would like to present herself as just another little old lady in tennis shoes."
There is no question that Davis, the octogenarian, whose birth fell last month on April 5, lied.
Her hatred of Crawford was real enough, and away from the media, Davis heaped scorn on her rival's memory until the end of her days.
But what is less known is the reason for this antipathy.
On both sides, it was highly personal and sensitive, and was a case of unrequited love.
Crawford, a promiscuous bisexual, was in love with Davis but was rebuffed. Her co-star was firmly heterosexual.
Yet, an added dimension meant it was on Davis's part that the antagonism was most fierce.
This has remained secret for more than 70 years, but Davis, on her last visit to London two years before her death, revealed it to me: the love of Bette's life was a man she could never marry because he became Joan Crawford's second husband.
"She took him from me," Davis admitted bitterly in 1987. "She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness. I have never forgiven her for that and never will."
When she uttered these words, Crawford had been dead for ten years, and Davis, gaunt and wizened from a stroke and a mastectomy, was almost 80. Yet, the hatred remained intense.
This amazing saga of love and possession began in 1935 when Bette Davis was 27, and was cast by her studio, Warner Bros, in the role that was to win her the first of her Best Actress Oscars.
In the melodrama Dangerous, Davis played Joyce Heath, a neurotic, egomaniacal alcoholic actress, loosely based on the Broadway star Jeanne Eagels, who died from a heroin overdose aged 35.
Playing opposite her, as the architect who tries to rehabilitate the fallen star, was the tall, dark and attractive 30-year-old actor Franchot Tone, born into a well-off New York family and a graduate of Cornell University.
Davis had been married for three years to her high school sweetheart, the musician Harmon Oscar ("Ham") Nelson. Nelson was not successful in his career, and spent long periods away from home, touring in an orchestra.
The marriage lacked passion and was seen as a failure.
Within a few days of working on Dangerous, everyone on set realised Davis was attracted to Franchot Tone.
Years later she said: "I fell in love with Franchot, professionally and privately. Everything about him reflected his elegance, from his name to his manners."
There was only one problem. Joan Crawford, MGM's reigning sex symbol, recently divorced from Hollywood's dashing crown prince, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., had got to Tone before her.
Davis, trained for the theatre, saw herself as an actress. She considered Crawford "a glamour puss," whose success depended entirely on her looks.
Bette also believed that Joan used sex to advance her career. "She slept with every star at MGM", she alleged later, "of both sexes."
There was some truth in this. Most of Crawford's leading men had succumbed to her sexual magnetism.
And she counted several female stars, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck and later Marilyn Monroe, among her lovers.
It was rumoured that Crawford would have liked to add Davis to her conquests.
"Franchot isn't interested in Bette," she said, "but I wouldn't mind giving her a poke if I was in the right mood. Wouldn't that be funny?"
When Crawford first entertained Franchot at her Hollywood home, he found her in the solarium, tanned from head to foot and naked.
According to friends and neighbours, Tone did not emerge from the solarium until nightfall.
"He was madly in love with her," Davis admitted. "They met each day for lunch... he would return to the set, his face covered with lipstick. He made sure we all knew it was Crawford's lipstick.
He was honoured that this great star was in love with him. I was jealous, of course."
During the filming of Dangerous, Crawford announced her engagement to Tone. To Davis's fury, they married in New Jersey soon after the film wrapped.
The hostility between the two women surfaced at the Oscars, where Davis was nominated as Best Actress.
Doubting she would win, Bette wore a simple navy blue dress to the ceremony.
As her name was announced the winner, Tone leapt to his feet and embraced her.
But his wife remained seated, her back to Davis, until her husband said: "Darling!"
Turning her head, the immaculately groomed and spectacularly gowned Crawford looked Davis up and down and then observed acidly: "Dear Bette! What a lovely frock."
Both women were to marry four times. Bette had divorced "Ham" Nelson and Joan had divorced Tone by the time Davis won a second Best Actress Oscar for Jezebel in 1938, making her the top box office star at Warner Bros.
But the mid-1940s were to bring a downswing in Davis's popularity, threatening her position as queen of the Warner studio.
As Bette's star began to dim, Crawford moved from MGM to Warner Bros, where she demanded the dressing room next to that of Davis.
In her first major movie for the studio, Mildred Pierce, Crawford upstaged Davis by winning a Best Actress Oscar, and was signed by Warner Bros on a seven-year contract at $200,000 a film.
Davis was aghast. Having watched helplessly as Crawford stole the love of her life, she now looked on as her rival took her Hollywood crown.
Crawford allegedly made a series of lesbian overtures to Davis, all of which were rebuffed by Bette with hilarity.
Hearing that Crawford had told gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she and Bette "may even do a picture together", Davis commented: "When Hell freezes over."
To another studio observer, Davis vowed: "I wouldn't p**s on Joan Crawford if she was on fire."
Yet, by the early 1960s, when both stars, now in their 50s, were seen as box office poison, it was Crawford who came to her rival's rescue, by finding the novel that teamed them both in the most sensational comeback in cinema history.
In What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Davis was cast as Baby Jane Hudson, a demented and alcoholic former child star, who allegedly cripples her sister, Blanche, a Hollywood movie queen (Crawford) in a car accident.
Jack Warner, the former studio boss of Davis and Crawford, refused to finance the film, commenting: "I wouldn't give you one dime for those two washed-up old bitches."
As Davis later recounted in chat shows, studio after studio rejected the project, telling producer-director Robert Aldrich: "If you get rid of those two old broads and sign some real box office names, we'll give you the money."
But Aldrich went ahead on a modest budget with a tight six-week shooting schedule.
On set, observers noticed Davis constantly needling Crawford, running her pen through the script.
"Whose dialogue are you cutting, Bette?" asked Crawford. "Yours!" snapped Davis.
When Crawford, widow of Pepsi-Cola president Alfred Steele, provided the set with a Pepsi cooler, Davis discovered that Joan's bottle of Pepsi, always at her elbow, was half-full of vodka.
"That bitch is loaded half the time!" raged Bette. "How dare she pull this c**p on a picture with me? I'll kill her!"
When, in the kicking scene, Davis's shoe touched Crawford's scalp, Bette claimed it was an accident.
But Crawford soon evened the score. In a later scene where Baby Jane has to drag her crippled sister from her bed, Crawford concealed a weightlifter's belt, lined with lead, under her dress.
Davis struggled to lift her, yelling: "My back! Oh, God! My back!" Crawford calmly got to her feet and strolled off, smiling, to her dressing room.
When the film was released, both stars, who shared in the profits, made a fortune.
Davis was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar; Crawford was not.
Davis claimed that Crawford campaigned to prevent her from winning.
At the Oscars ceremony, when Anne Bancroft's name was announced as Best Actress, Davis said: "I will never forget the look she [Joan] gave me.
"It was triumphant. It clearly said: 'You didn't win, and I am elated!'"
Crawford received the Oscar on behalf of the absent Bancroft.
The newspapers showed Crawford holding the Oscar her rival had failed to win.
Davis was furious. Two years later, when Robert Aldrich tried to team Davis and Crawford in another film, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the hatred between the two defeated him.
Davis assembled the cast and crew, minus Crawford, for photos in which they all drank Coca-Cola, Pepsi's rival product. After all, Crawford had been married to the Pepsi president.
Overwhelmed by Davis's hostility, Crawford diplomatically claimed to have pneumonia. She was replaced in the film by Olivia de Havilland.
In 1968, the feud re-surfaced when Davis learned that Tone, the love of her life and a chronic chain-smoker, was dying from lung cancer.
Crawford took her ex-husband into her nine-room New York flat and nursed him until his death, even supervising the scattering of his ashes.
"Even when the poor bastard was dying, that bitch wouldn't let him go," raged Davis.
"She had to monopolise him even in death."
On March 1, 1977, the American Film Institute honoured Davis with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
Crawford neither attended nor watched the ceremony on television.
Crawford, who had quit drinking two years earlier, weighed less than 7st. [The British equivalent to 98 pounds.]
On May 10, 1977, she died at her New York flat, aged 73.
The official cause of death was "acute coronary occlusion", but the real one was said to be liver cancer.
No tribute and no word of regret came from Davis, and she went to none of the memorial services.
In private, however, during the television screening of one of Crawford's films, Davis stared at her rival's striking features before observing: "That dame had a face."
At the following year's Academy Awards, at which Davis was a presenter, the wide eyes of Joan Crawford, the ultimate movie star, filled the screen to audience applause.
Looking at a monitor, Davis paused and said of her enemy: "Poor Joan, gone but not forgotten. Bless you!"
In her will, Crawford disinherited her adopted daughter Christina and her adopted son Christopher.
A year later, Christina responded with the book Mommie Dearest, painting her as a drunken, abusive and sadistic mother.
"I don't blame the daughter, don't blame her at all," commented Davis.
"One area of life Joan should never have gone into was children. I've never behaved like that...
Well, I doubt that my children will write a book."
But Crawford's ghost had the last laugh.
For in 1985, after Davis had undergone a mastectomy and suffered a stroke, her daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, published My Mother's Keeper, depicting Bette as "a mean-spirited, wildly neurotic, profane and pugnacious boozer, who took out her anger at the world by abusing those close to her".
Like Crawford, Davis disinherited her daughter.
The similarities between the two stars may have been too great for Davis to confront.
To the end of her days, the mere mention of Crawford triggered a bitter tirade. In 1987, during the filming of her penultimate movie The Whales Of August, Davis abused her dead rival to the cast and crew.
Director Lindsay Anderson slammed his hand on the table and told her that Crawford had been his friend and he wasn't going to listen to any more.
Banging her fist down even harder and raising her voice, Bette delivered her final comment on her adversary.
"Just because a person's dead," she said, "doesn't mean they've changed."
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