Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

ÆSCHYLUS, EURIPIDES AND ALDRICH: WHY QUEENS LOVED WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

Robert Aldrich’s film caused a sensation on its release (1962) and was held dear by queens for several decades. Time and the advent of Queer has seen its significance wane. I would like to explain why it was so esteemed by queens for so long and why it is more than a grand Guignol horror flick with memorable lines such as But y’are Blanche, y’are (Jane [Bette Davis] to her crippled sister Blanche [Joan Crawford], after Blanche has complained Jane would not be treating her this way if Blanche was not in a wheelchair).

Will you accept the notion that every queen is lit by the near-surface struggles of a Femme sashaying and screeching and hollering to be the surface? Such a spirit probably resides in all men but the cost of macho is burying It. This accounts for that repressed air which is concomitant with macho.

The two principal characters of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? take on the aspect of the Femme at war with Itself. Blanche, wheelchair-bound, is increasingly oppressed; Jane, always apparently unrestrained, has begun to reel manically, fuelled by alcohol. The impulse which has set Jane reeling is the discovery that Blanche is plotting with Jane’s doctor to sell the cavernous family home and put Jane in a sanatorium. Jane is having none of this nursing home business; she has decided it is time for a comeback, for her to embrace life again after all these years of expiation looking after her crippled sister.

Jane confronts Blanche about her collusion with the doctor and barks that the house is hers, Daddy bought it with her money. A conflict ensues over this matter: Blanche counterclaims the mansion was bought with her money. And indeed in the segment of the film labelled 1935 we have heard studio executives talking about Blanche having bought the old Valentino place as a home for herself and her sister. Authority, autonomy are the fundamental things that the sisters are in conflict about - who is Mother; the family home has obviously become the focus for this. Despite the evidence provided by the Studio Executives, we have a lingering doubt … for all her egregious faults, we feel Jane does not lie to her sister, nor plot against her; it is Blanche who is devious. And Bette Davis gives the moment of confrontation over ownership of the house a ring of truth and sincerity – Daddy bought this house for me. More chillingly, she goes on to inform Blanche Y’aren’t ever goin’ to sell this house. And y’aren’t ever going to leave it, either.

Were we psychoanalytically inclined we might see the film as a battle between the Superego (Blanche) and the Id (Jane). Blanche’s realm is her upstairs bedroom from which elevation she glimpses the outside world; Jane wallows downstairs.

The Madonna and the Whore are locked in mortal coil. Jane, the Id/Whore, is the active principal, raging and reconnoitring for strategic strikes. Blanche, the Superego/Madonna can only observe from above, roll her eyes, weep, protest and plot to keep the Whore in thrall. When she does take action, dragging her crippled body down to Jane’s realm in order to seek help from external reality, Jane discovers her and immobilises her further and silences her. The Madonna is cursed if she takes action. Even when we glimpse Blanche in her glory as a great Metro star (a daytime television rerun of one of Crawford’s roles), she is a Madonna forced into Whore’s clothing ultimately revealed as her ‘true’ self, a Madonna robed in white, ecstatically supine and adored. When we glimpse Jane as a film player she is a tramp with a Southern accent, all gyrating energy going nowhere. The studio executives despair of Jane Hudson. She is only a player because Blanche has had written into her contract that for every film she makes, Jane must make one too. The martyr Madonna is adored, the vital Whore despised. The Madonna seeks to control the Whore.

Why wouldn’t queens love that? Here is a lesson worth contemplating: be silent, suffer and die a martyr, or rage to live, no matter what they think. We watched Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in an ecstatic confusion as to what it was offering us, for in those days we had not yet dared to spell out our lack of viable options.

Enter the Phallus. Hopelessly compromised in the form of Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono), recently employed by Jane as an accompanist. Jane decides he’s hers, consummately disgusting though he is.

The one other emissary of the wider reality who enters the Domain of the Demented is Elvira (Maidie Norman). Elvira is Black and works. She therefore has a dignity and decency beyond that of the protagonists and their neighbours (a mother and daughter, respectively desperate in their lack of meaningful employment and seethingly indolent). To continue the psychoanalytic schema … Elvira might be said to be the Ego, attempting to mediate the Id and Superego. Though she is a merciful and formidable emissary from a saner reality, once trapped amongst the Shades and Furies, she does not really stand a chance. Hers is not a fate for which we could claim tragedy, impressive though she is and terrible her fate, for she lacks sufficient stature in this psychodrama: Elvira is an unfortunate casualty in a struggle between larger forces.

Where are we? In a crumbling Spanish Mission mansion in a Hollywood itself in decline since the advent of television and the end of the studio system. We are emerging from the Fifties, still locked in the Cold War. Those in the know might feel Norma Desmond lives just down the road. The neighbours’ house abuts Jane and Blanche’s in a way that suggests the land on which it is built was once part of the sisters’ estate, sold off to pay the rates. The gangster twenties still linger in the presence of jodhpured cops, the Depression thirties in the line of villas in which Edwin and his mother (Marjorie Bennett) live. Jane herself, dressed for business in a style decades out of date and driving a car collectors would pant over, embodies the film’s anachronistic element caught in the swirling exhaust fumes now polluting Los Angeles’ air. Her powder is de ris and again, those in the know, might feel she just reeks of Je Reviens as she flirts with the newspaper advertising clerk in the sweltering humidity.

It is a noir world – cops, confidence men, eliding identities, dissolute and irresolute, violent … It is a world from which the past must be purged. And in every way, the film pursues that theme. The curse is laid in its 1917 prologue when the child Blanche (Gina Gillespie), comforted by her mother in the face of obliteration by the child star Jane, retorts I won’t forget, you bet I won’t forget! Later the Studio Executives warn that Jane is going to end up in a home one day. In awe of a car they have come across, one asks the other Tell me something, who do they make monsters like this for? The ominous answer is Blanche Hudson, that’s who.

But Blanche, with her subsequent great success and Baby Jane’s huge decline and now Blanche’s revival via television reruns, does seem to have forgotten her childhood imprecation. It is Jane who has gone on a rampage of vengeance, who seems to remember. It is with her once famous But y’are Blanche, y’are that she now defies Blanche’s attempt to control her with guilt.

Two narcissists have collided; Daddy’s girl is in conflict with Mommy’s. The sadist is revealed in the masochist and the converse. Robert Aldrich and screenwriter Lukas Heller, adapting Henry Farrell’s novel, gave us an elemental passion not broached in Greek tragedy – sibling rivalry. And it appears to be an act of hubris.

The casting is wonderful. Maidie Norman as Elvira conveys a determinedly not-bitter force of character and fidelity. Norman’s expression establishes without dialogue or any other explanation her key importance in the plot. Wordlessly she provides the film’s most thrilling moment. Victor Buono brings to Edwin Flagg (the names, oh the names) a perfection of slobbish greed, affectation and ruthlessness. Edwin was the epitome of a type we all dreaded we were or would become. Marjorie Bennett as his mother is a dwarf vulgarian with enough heart left for her son to run a dagger into. Together they presented to appalled queens an object lesson in the œdipal. Anna Lee as the Hudson sisters’ neighbour, Mrs Bates (Psycho Came out in 1960), is a tightly wound housewife struggling with the confines of a role Women’s lib is soon to challenge. Her daughter, played by Better Davis’ daughter B D Merrill, is a Los Angeles slut in the making. Robert Cornthwaite as Dr Shelby conveys a harried professional arrogance which dooms Blanche. They are all (with the exception of B D who seems just a bit extraordinary trolloping in front of the TV set) almost familiar in their rightness. And indeed they were familiar to viewers of the time from the actors’ many bit parts on TV as well as in film. They allow the film a remarkable economy. Nothing in this extraordinary enough context needed to be dwelt on or explained, it is there, as familiar and believable as our local shopping centre. Consider Jane placing her ad for an accompanist in the newspaper office: a poudre de ris monster with a heart-shaped beauty mark gouged into her drooping cheek expecting to be recognised and adored by clerks young enough to be her grandchildren. They shift slightly, barely exchange looks and politely indulge her. So too in the bank – the teller is worried by the change in routine and evidently intimidated by her bizarre client but deals with Jane professionally, if to no avail. Each player knew their place and delivered what was required of them. Aldrich’s touch was sure. We might also note Gina Gillespie’s brooding, fierce-eyed resentment as the obscured child Blanche – it resonates throughout the film. These performers created a context in which two once-great stars could, in a hitherto undreamt of occurrence, orbit in what was left of one another’s radiance: would there be an eclipse?

Crawford is almost always underestimated as an actor. Actually she produced many very good and varied performances. She developed her gift, frequently by taking on challenges a mere star would have balked at. She brought to Blanche, not only the evidence of her long and successful career – dignity and grace – but radiance and determination, then desperation and defeat. She brings to Blanche a sense of strength both physical (even though her character is in a wheelchair), and deceptively enough, moral.

Davis’ Jane is surely one of the great performances. Observe the ballet of her raddled, enraged character. Watch her on the stairs, the violence with which she deals with the insistence of Blanche’s summonsing bell and with Blanche herself. Watch her convey drunken calculating slatternliness as she delivers Blanche her horrifying lunches. And listen. To the coarseness of her fiendish laugh, her nearly-asphyxiated-by-booze-and-rage tones. Let me try to atomise its fascination: outrageous, operatic, fearless, finely calibrated across genre styles.

Both Davis and Crawford seem to belong, in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, to Greek tragedy, or Noh - Crawford with her character settled in thick eyebrows and set lips, her dull robe, Davis with her arsenic white face and bloodshot eyes, the matted tendrils of her once golden hair. Their faces are masks of ritual, expressionistic. This film declares itself outside the conventional styles of Hollywood cinema; it is neither realistic, nor entirely noir, nor can we categorise it as B grade, despite its originality and obviously cheap production (William Glasgow’s Art Direction seems to me outstanding). It has too many depths and perspectives for horror/thriller. It received five Academy Award nominations (it won one for Norma Koch - Best Costume Design, Black-and-White).

It provided queens with a shock of recognition: the bizarre interiors of conventional reality, the suppressed passion, the expressionistic acting out. The slow burning disguised hatred, the ancient oppressions and guilts. In those Cold War days it was said, ‘only homosexuals go to the movies’; the Family was supposed to huddle, hypnotised in front of the TV. On occasions such as this, the movies rewarded its faithful with rare glimpses of themselves.

How is this psychodrama to enact catharsis? The dying Blanche confesses, on a beach, to having deceived Jane about the accident which crippled her. In doing so, she suggests something about Jane which she has already indicated to us – You didn’t know my sister when she was young Elvira, she was – oh, so alive! – and which we may have not suspected. Jane, now pathetically, evilly raddled, and dreadful though her films might have been, had really been a star once, she really did have a riveting vitality. Blanche confesses to her sister You weren’t ugly then, I made you that way, I even did that. Jane had been so cruelly funny imitating Blanche at a party that Blanche flew into a murderous rage. The Madonna had taken action. And now she wants to confess. Jane’s response effects the catharsis; she does not even need to forgive Blanche the terrible revenge that has been Blanche’s daily study You mean all this time we could have been friends? Jane, now regressed to her child star self, scampers off down the beach to buy her sister an ice-cream. It is on this mission that she discovers her audience again. It is over for both of them; the past has been purged.

Let us say our Jane was one of the harbingers of Stonewall. It let us know: this is now the past.

This film did not fit any genre or category, did not meet any preconceived expectation. It took a huge risk on being merely absurd, it rose above schlock and defied the grotesque to uncover pathos. It had what all great drama has – a foundation in ritual, in myth. It was an astonishment. One left the cinema devastated and elated. That is why queens loved Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

Ian MacNeill