What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? by Johanna Isaacson

While thousands of magazine puff pieces claim we can now grow older with grace, retaining our beauty and independence into our 60s, 70s, or even 80s, really, we know aging is a game that can’t be won, especially by women. But I’ve already put myself to sleep writing that obvious statement. Luckily, we have hagsploitation to save us from sanctimonious proclamations on the topic.

Instead of righteous platitudes, this genre, which came into being with Baby Jane, treats us to twisted, campy manifestos disguised as lurid horror. In these films, women don’t bother to beg for their rights or rationally claim their place in society, but instead gleefully act out taboo desires and nightmares.

As many have noted, we can’t fully separate the characters Jane and Blanche from the actresses who play them. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ended up in this film because
they were “too old” to be cast in anything else. They were also emblems of the waning Hollywood Golden Age, often periodized as lasting from 1913 to 1962, the year Baby Jane was released. This ending was marked by the unraveling of Classical Hollywood’s formal and moral cinematic codes that reinforced rigid class, gender, and racial hierarchies. As the big five studio system slowly dissolved, so did the relevance of Davis’s and Crawford’s carefully constructed personae.

Through the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, both Davis and Crawford shapeshifted into constantly morphing masquerades of glamor and beauty, mobilizing their talent, their “natural gifts” such as bone structure and measurements, and their work ethic to adapt to changing circumstances. But here came the early ’60s, and they could no longer pass as conventional stars.

When Crawford read Henry Farrell’s novel, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, depicting two aging actresses locked in a death struggle, the same instinct that sustained a decades-long career told her this was the vehicle for yet another renewal, and that she must recruit her so-called nemesis, Bette Davis, to act opposite her. Director Robert Aldrich, with whom she had worked on Autumn Leaves, was keen on the project as well. Aldrich, considered a brilliant auteur in the ’50s, was himself in danger of becoming another casualty of the waning studio system, and his gut was telling him that this sensationalistic, gothic tale of perverted dreams would help him stay in the game, even as the game itself was transforming.

The film’s wild success would unambiguously renew Aldrich’s career. But for Crawford and Davis, opportunity came with a price. To shine again they had to foreground their tarnish, cashing in on glamorous careers through self-parody.