Bette Davis and Joan Crawford weren't the only sisters at war that night
Did they see themselves in it?
No. Neither was that smart.
Two sisters. "Sisters"! More like rivals, each desperate for their taciturn father's approval, the man whose wife left him shortly after giving him four kids, including the eldest and the youngest, the sisters.
He was everything to those girls, regardless of his lukewarm responses to their needs. He was their solvency, their connection, the thin string that prevented them from being children adrift, orphans of a big, bad world.
And it was big and bad - again, not terms I am using loosely: a depressed, working class neighborhood populated by drunken war veterans, battling couples, and teenage toughs who became some of the most notorious criminals in Canada.
The brothers reveled in; that was their anchor, their substitute for what the old man couldn't provide. But that same world would have swallowed those little girls whole, and so they sought refuge in the only symbol of security they knew.
I didn't know all this then, of course, all of this rivalry for that house's one precious commodity. But I was getting my first glimpse of it, as - incredible considering how young I must have been - I sat between my mother and her sister and watched the first ever TV broadcast of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.
They took such interest in the friction between the characters, between Gothic apple doll Bette Davis and simmering, sunken-eyed Joan Crawford. They would make comments, have small, heated exchanges about which characters behavior was warranted and which wasn't, and, whenever they took a time out from this projection of the personal, made sure that I could handle what was going on onscreen and comfort me - and even that they fought about.
I, of course, being extremely young, had no idea - as they for different reasons had no idea - that another agenda was at work. It was not until years later, after my umpteenth showing of the film, did I experience a Freudian flash and equate the onscreen goings on with their lives.
In the film, the rivalry was resolved with one of the sisters' deaths. In life, it's possible that the same thing happened; my mother died some years ago, and her sister, long estranged, surprised us all by appearing at the funeral.
She left the church without saying much...but as she left, my head filled with images of Bette Davis dancing.
